The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.