Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt "the real Internet" was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.

I've come to realize that it's always been shitty. That's my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn't understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.

The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn't because computers weren't powerful enough yet.

Enshittification my dear comrades.

Granted, the more academic term is known as rent-seeking. Even lib economists warn against this and is the source of so many ills of society.

Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.

We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:

Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.

Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.

Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.

Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.

There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.

It's not just the Internet, it's all technology. In the 90s, there was sort of excitement over anything new coming to the market. Now it's ”oh good, new tech for our overlords to somehow screw us with”. Doesn't help that back then there were a hell of a lot more true technological progress, just look at what a PC was like in 1990 compared to 1999.

Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.

Well, at least in terms of information security a lot of progress was made, you just don't tend to hear anything about that. I'd say the 2010s was the time where all that was being put into place, actually.

That exciting early 2000s Internet was unbelievably shitty. Nearly every widely-used protocol was easily exploitable or had massive flaws, hardly any encryption being in place, bad password practices and very little security-awareness among users, very widespread malware, etc.

There's definitely a lot of answers that are looking for a question out there, with lots of corporate greed in play, but I don't think it's quite as grim as you make it out to be.

I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was "cool." I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.

Popularity and by extension, money, will corrupt and ruin everything.