The former brought massive amounts of spam and the latter brought real identies which broke the freedom of the internet.
Or in other words, both brought the Internet and made it real and connected with the real world. And I think that's not a good thing. The Internet was supposed to be a virtual space for exploration, learning, fun, and it should have had no bearing on our actual day-to-day living experience.
But now here we are where Google is a spam filled search engine which hardly returns any products and Facebook is a dystopian wasteland and its founder is walking around like a teenage pimp.
Replace "The Internet" with previous communications technology and maybe that will demonstrate how completely unrealistic that sounds. Television should have had no bearing on our day-to-day existence? Phones? Radio?
I guess you can arbitrarily draw the line at the Internet, sort of like the Amish did with electricity. But it seems arbitrary to me.
The moral of every sci-fi story is that technology is morally neutral and it's how you use it that matters. Why would The Internet be different?
This was the ideal final form of the internet and we lost it forever. Now, we have sludge.
