Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has slammed Big Tech for abusing their power to create an “appalling” Internet.

“They can shape your experience, they can control what you see, when you see it and you become essentially a cog in their machine,” Sanger told CNBC.

Sanger slammed Facebook for their role in exploiting users’ data to make vast profits at the cost of “massive violations” of privacy.

Summit.news reports: He directly called out Mark Zuckerberg as being “too controlling” and having no idea about “bottom up” networks.

“The internet wouldn’t have been created by people like Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the sort of corporate executives in Silicon Valley today,” said Sanger.

Sanger’s solution, outlined in his Declaration of Digital Independence, is that these “vast digital empires” need to be replaced by networks of decentralized individuals.

This would return the Internet to becoming “freer,” the very foundation on which it was created in the first place, according to the Wikipedia co-founder.

“These networks would, for example, allow individuals to publish information online without going through a central organization, like a corporation. In the same way that bitcoin is a “decentralized” asset not subject to authorities like central banks, decentralized social networks would mean no single platform could control users’ data online,” reports CNBC.