Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.
TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher
# The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C)
HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types.
[No-crypto P2P]
# Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,)
Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate
# ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,)
Linked Data; RDF, RDFa
5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/
- Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW
# Web3 ("Zero-Trust")
SK: Secret Key
PK: Public Key
Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure
ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs.
(A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs)
(DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)
I'm also not sure why "the technology is in its infancy and doesn't give us great indications at if it is usable in the real world, but right now is full of scammers and fraud" isn't an acceptable position. Why does it have to either be the next great new thing or a grift? People grifting with new technology and taking advantage of the tech illiterate is pretty common.