Super weird. I recall that tickets from cameras were found to be not enforceable in California back in the early 2000's because officers signing the tickets were not on site at the point of the infraction and so could not testify that they actually witnessed the full scope/context of the events in question before any court of appeal.
I wonder if that's changed or if this system is somehow different than the previous iterations where officers signed tickets after only witnessing video footage.
I think there is a path forward where the internet and the content on it are sufficiently commoditized that the costs become trivial to average people, like the cost of running an LED at night, and so monied interests move into other areas like robotics and the internet begins to drift back toward the idealized vision mentioned in this post.
I doubt it will ever drift all the way back, but it is getting super cheap to run edge compute and store data on the cloud.
It's getting increasingly cheap to write code with LLMs too, and if that continues to evolve at the rate it's going then users are not going to feel locked into their big-name platform of choice anymore. Porting from Apple to Google to Microsoft to Amazon to Self-Hosted etc, will be a lower and lower bar with fewer and fewer barriers for the average user, making for a hint of that old wild frontier feeling online again.