There's two fundamental systemic blockers to investment in information security.

The first is a problem is with incentives over time. (The same thing happened with global warming, with overfishing, with deforestation, with cyber privacy rights, etc.) The problem is that the immediate incentives do not align with the long term incentives. If the country that can cut down the most forest or burn the most oil is the one that wins, relative to the other, a global race for power projection - no country will want to perform in the short term what it must in the long term.

Alas, today the short term incentives in software and hardware development are mostly the same. The security community has long preached that built in security as a crucial and fundamental engineering design goal. Today, as it has been for decades before, software is not competitive if it has security built in. It raises the costs of development and it slows production and building security awareness into every developer would require years of additional professional experience or schooling: building in security is a competitive disadvantage.

The second problem is that everyone's threat model is different:

- Consumers want their computers to run quickly and do not want their information or identity stolen. They want to have convenient and reliable control over the privacy of their online interactions - from the public and from law enforcement.

- Industry does not want to spend more time and treasure creating fewer visible features. Their existential threat model is losing their business by being too slow at production. Corporations are also scared dumb of having a SONY-style or Target-style breach.

- Government wants to be able to peek into all communications of everyone including its citizens. It wants to be able to hack into other countries - both their industrial and their government sectors - and those of private foreign citizens. It does not want the same to be true in reverse.

It's also true that the types of systems used by the military are different than those used in industry which are further different than those used by consumers. Where do you allocate investment in security? Consumer internet browsers? Virtualization for enterprises? Network intrusion detection for corporate LANs? Access control for government systems? Which do you prioritize? (Granted, its true that some technologies are shared between these classes, such as web browsers)

What's happening right now is that the discussion about threat model is being negotiated (though not in those conscious terms). Governments make their case about national security - how they need backdoors - and how they would like computer security to work. Security professionals - many of them private citizens - have separate threat models and can't agree with government. Individual citizens want privacy - and can't agree with government or industry. Industry wants to get customer and competitor data but also doesn't want to leak their own.

To the degree that the threat models are compatible, some level of real investment can be made (today there do happen to be large scale efforts to mitigate cyber security risks - particularly threat intelligence sharing programs).

Yet fundamental contradictions in threat models will keep the direction of security in limbo and worse if some threat model 'wins' it will comes at he expense of the others. Government's goals, even in so labeled 'free' countries, are disaligned with their citizens on threat model. Government goals themselves are further internally contradictory, as they would like computer networks to be both secure and insecure (giving birth to phraseology such as "NOBUS").

Today not only are we not able to secure the internet and computer systems, we still don't really know what a secure internet would mean.