[tryp4vps]

..... The dark net now seems to be looking attractive to me. Where does one start with it? Like can someone really savvy create a "safe zone" in the dark net where Governments and large corporations can't get their greedy fingers in?

The easiest way to get started is to create an onion website and access it on darknet through the Tor browser.

Back to what your title says, I do agree with you that our freedom of the Internet is mostly gone. More and more services now require KYC, but sadly there are very few of them willing to protect the privacy of their customers like the way Hostlease is doing.