I don’t see this at all. To my mind it is arguably humanity’s greatest achievement to date aside from art/music and the Hubble Space Telescope! The thing that is so wonderful about it is it exists largely out of reach of petty nationalism and the utter stupidity of local politics. I want the internet to be as unregulated and as open as it can possibly be and nothing pisses me off more than entrenched politics of the hard-right/left trying to grab control of it. I far prefer to see end-user/consumer choices and market forces define it.
I guess I have a certain perspective as being an IT guy I’ve been online before the www even existed, I remember getting the very first version of Mosaic when it was released and the first pfm site followed a few months to a year later once I had learned enough HTML to fling something up. This was Windows 3 and 14.4 baud modem era! I love that it remains a wild west, that *everything* exists online and there is next to bugger-all authoritarian arseholes like Theresa May, Jack Straw, David Blunkett or their current equivalents can really do about it. That makes me intensely happy.
I have no issue with those who have built very successful businesses in this new world no matter how popular and dominant they become. No one is forced to use them. The biggest disappointment is seeing the internet fill up with utterly thick people. At the start it was obviously just IT guys, academics etc. If you weren’t bright enough to use a command line FTP, gopher, archie client or whatever you weren’t bright enough to be online. The thing I resent is the suggestion the whole thing now needs oppressively politically regulating just because it is full of idiots.
When arguing about regulation always start from the perspective of speaking truth to power and work from there. Whilst it is no secret I think Julian Assange is an duplicitous egotistical prick Wikileaks was at one point the absolute definition of what the internet should be. No government of any nation wants to face that degree of truth and they will all attempt to do anything in their power to shut it down. The key priority IMHO is keeping the internet right out of the hands of national authoritarianism and we have to view the whole picture in order to do that. I’m more than happy to allow the likes of Facebook through to QAnon to exist as, like everyone else, I simply don’t have the right to say or do anything otherwise as thankfully it all exists beyond our reach. One either believes in a free open unrestricted internet, or one doesn’t. I am anti-state authoritarianism and will always support the former.
I’ll keep my site moderated exactly how I want it to be and I’ll gain/lose visitors accordingly, but beyond that the internet is just the internet as far as I’m concerned. I’ll pick the bit I want to visit, use the tools I want to use, and ignore the rest.