The majority of society today doesn't make use of this freedom, but the few who do have helped to keep in check those who would control the flow of information. The network is analogous to the telephone in this regard. Information was made available faster with the advent of the computer, but it didn't free the information for the individual. In fact, in many ways it forced stricter controls on information. But the network has little centralized authority and, like the phone system, is difficult to control without outright unplugging it.
Information passes freely, beyond geographic and geopolitical boundaries.
With information freed, people are free to make their own choices. And that's revolutionary. Evolutionary Linux is not the second revolution. As impactful as the coming of the PC, Linux is an evolutionary event which could not have been predicted nor stopped. It was only through circumstance that the systems developed to manage that data came primarily from a single source, Microsoft.