Right now I would say that the biggest consumer vs. corporate battlefield on the interwebs is Net Neutrality. Essentially, the vast majority of consumers believe they should have universal access to all internet content at uniform speeds. ISPs believe they should be able to warp speeds to limit the users access to specific content and influence/control the manner in which users are able to interact with the net. Everyone not in the pocket of an ISP would agree that the net should be neutral and so I would expect that we will have a good approximation of net neutrality in the not to distant future (but never underestimate the power of well appointed lobbies and weakness of the CRTC and its American counterpart).

Unfortunately, I believe what the average person or even techy fails to realize is that there is a much more pressing issue caused by the virtual monopoly and certainly oligopoly that Google and its lesser competitors Bing and Yahoo have on search. Consider for a moment the power these organizations posses by being able to warp and manipulate the web content you access … how much of what you read and absorb from the net is directly related to what came up in the top 3 Google search results? The reality is that Google and other search engines have significant control over the content you consume, products you buy and knowledge you garner from the Internet. And, search is universal, so, having the power of control over these results is magnified across every internet user.

Having a small number of corporations (that are subject to zero oversight and who provide virtually no transparency to their operations) with effective control over the access to information on the internet is an unhealthy and unsafe situation. Add to that the fact that search is a monetized process where it is inherently beneficial to manipulate control over the system both overtly and covertly.

So, here is the ground breaking, world destroying, totally way better alternative - Open source, community driven, peer reviewed, fully transparent, DEmonetized search that is managed in an egalitarian manner by a community that has minimal barriers to entry (too bad that doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily as Google). Each aspect is important to providing a complete solution that can democratize search. But, ultimately it comes down to community driven and de-monetized factors. These are the concepts that brought us Wikipedia (arguably the single largest and most comprehensive source of human knowledge since the library of Alexandria) and they are the same concepts that should revolutionize search.