Just take a look at at computing systems within highly regulated industries such as consumer banking or medicine. Do you find either inspiring? How about nuclear power plants still using technology from our grandparents' era because doing so was legislated?
I'd bet that if such regulations came to pass in a country or market, in 15 years the internet there will lag considerably behind the internet in freer places.
I don't think the purpose of consumer banking should be to inspire us with technological wizardry. It should be to provide a stable suite of services to customers, with protections to safeguard those customers where appropriate. If 50-year-old Cobol mainframes are serving that goal, well and good. If they're not (say, because they're more susceptible to breaches), then those companies running outdated software should be penalized until they upgrade their shit.
For each of your points, there are counterpoints to be made where government-imposed regulation had a positive effect on the citizenry. Do you find Teflon-induced cancers inspiring? What about marketing cigarettes to children? Should we get rid of all FDA labels on food products? More pertinently, should we do away with Sarbanes-Oxley and give corporations free reign over how they manage their financial affairs?
Restrictions on liberty are a fundamental part of living in a society, whether we're talking about individual or corporate liberties. This isn't to say that all regulation is perfect, or that there won't be some bumps in the road. Far from it. But I consider it a hallmark of our immaturity as a society that we see the regulatory landscape in such black-and-white terms as "regulation kills innovation".
Of course, entrenched industries spend tons of money trying to convince the average person that this is the case, so perhaps it is excusable that so many people feel that way...
but perhaps web 3.0 (dweb) can just bypass all this nonsense and make its own versions of these popular services with baked-in accessibility for all.
The history of technological process is a history of agglomeration and if web3 reduces barriers all it does is creates more, not less leverage for centralization, the same way the internet did after a short phase of disruption, or even book printing for that matter.
telescript was kinda of weird, but wildly ahead of its time. the idea was decentralized services and commercial activity, but centralizing computation due to power/energy efficiency.
it was like a inverse jvm born at the transition from arpanet->nsfnet->internet, which greatly deregulated commercial activity.
it was also born when mobile devices were almost tractible, though 14 years before the iphone.
it almost birth the idea of an app store, except "apps" would be decentralized services people send/recv.
The real solution IMO is the Metaverse. Rather than a centralized authority with control over all the content, everyone would contribute to a protocol, much like email works. This I feel will kill the debate (as in, resolve it forever) over speech online. It's not that censorship will go away, I'm sure some providers will try to censor content, but it will be a non issue, cause you can just go and get the same content from another provider.
The Metaverse will be controlled by Facebook, which will define the protocol and control all of the content. If you want some kind of decentralized, Mastadon-like network for VR, that would be a completely different thing which (as far as I know) no one has actually made yet, not the Metaverse. But the Metaverse everyone will use will absolutely be controlled by Facebook, and if not them, Microsoft or some other centralizing entity.
Billionaires never want to revolutionize the system that made them billionaires in the first place. It would be tantamount to admitting their gains were ill-gotten.
At best, they're just figuring out new ways to transfer more wealth in the existing frameworks. At worst, they're pulling up the ladders they climbed up after them so none may follow (and challenge) them.
Though Nelson never pretended Xanadu would or could be democratic, explicitly stating it'd be a new rent seeking regime. Eschewing ads for fees.
I wonder if Dorsey feels any contrition over Twitter.
Square (SQ $77b) runs on fees and uses ML to mitigate fraud and protect commerce.
Twitter (TWTR $36b) runs on ads and uses ML to amplify fraud and sabotage civil discourse.
Imagine if Twitter had been run like Square. Would Twitter's market cap be more proportional to it's cultural impact? Or would it have simply ceded the parasocial mediums to the other amoral profiteers of fear and outrage?
Stretching my capacity for both creduality and principle of charity, I hope Dorsey is trying to find out with Block.
And if DeSo, DeFi, FyFoFum, or whatever other magic beans fiction serves the end goal of restoring civil discourse, the suspension of disbelief would be a small price to pay.
I'm no wiser as to what this reboot might consist of.
