Canonical is probably primarily focused on recreating the Mir wheel and other Unity/Ubuntu Phone/etc. I doubt a whole hell of a lot of that goes upstream.
You don't need to boycott AT&T, although, that would be nice.
They, Google, Level 3, etc. all own so much of the network backbones...it's impossible not to route through an adversarial trunk.
The answer is now encryption. End-to-end, and everywhere. Email should be considered as dead as the landline. Secure-IM and chat...along with self-hosted data services[like Owncloud] are the future. Or at least they should be.
Information is power and your adversaries will not give it up, ever. The only way to take that power is to scramble the bits.
Two giants whose revenue streams revolve around knowing their clients' personal business inside and out are suing the government because they want to get paid for turning the information over.
Just like the money PRISM brought to enable the monitoring, now they want per-use or even better regular rents from the government to keep the taps open.
The nice little side benefit is the puppet theater for their customers who still labor under the delusion that they have some shred of privacy with either of these for-profit corporations.
If an idea is truly novel and valuable to the marketplace no patent is needed because the novelty itself provides ample time for you to 'recover' your investment.
Either no patents or very short patents[<=12 months for anything] is a basic requirement for a progressive society.