The Holy Roman Church lost control because the governments of the day saw the advent of Protestantism and their own embrace of it as an opportunity to wrest power from the Church. Thus the monolithic control of the Church was forever fractured.
...his heretical ideas
Ideas don't require government permission to be held in the mind and heart.
What is being attempted here is the implementation of the use of a tool, the internet, that is ultimately controlled by governments and to conduct activity that those governments see as life threatening to them. If Assange and Anonymous are allowed to get away with it, the very foundation of the power of those governments dissolves. They will not allow that.
He has declared war on every government in the world simultaneously. All governments will ultimately see this and cooperate to extinguish Assange and his effort. They will first try to modify the current internet to mitigate the cost of a total restart. This will include draconian controls, monitoring, user cost and regulation. It will never be the free flowing communication vehicle of today.
If that fails, they will extinguish the internet, as we know it, shut it down, disconnect it, regardless of the cost. Then they will reconstitute it in a totally different and controlled format, different hardware, software, code, architecture, everything. It will be rebuilt so that nothing like this will ever be able to happen again.
The alternative to this is to abdicate control of their nation. They will never do that, regardless of the cost.
After the successful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, rather than rejoice is reported to have said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
I think this is also the result of Assange's actions. Future generations will look back and lament this as the beginning of the end to internet freedom.
I see it exactly the opposite. I see it as the long-awaited and long-needed beginning of the rollback of government encroachment against freedom.
They cannot stop it no more than could Pope Leo X stop Martin Luther.
Oh, they’ll try, but they will fail. I would bet my life on it.
Because that’s what’s at stake.