the internet was made to happen. and that is what happened.
I would say I have seen 3 completely different internets. and I started keeping track in the late 90s after the dotcom boom made it truly global and everywhere
There is the internet, there was a decision point to subsidize bunch of stuff with ads and here we are. It could’ve looked much different if, for example, Google decided to launch a subscription and market figured out it is viable path forward and people would refuse to interact with ads crap.
What 3?
It's almost a no-op for humanity. In the past we had disconnected, offline knowledge sources, like libraries and newspaper archives, and now we have them online, but we've packed it so full of spam and misinformation that it's hard to find anything and if you do, it's hard to trust it.
Now we're making tools to summarize it all, and they're no doubt going to be just as exploititive as the stuff we've put into it, and also untrustworthy. It's easy enough to find people telling you what you want to hear online, and it's even easier with ChatGPT.
Maybe people can't handle having access to all of the world's information.