Thanks anyways. I guess it’s just a hard problem to tackle. With freedom comes the freedom to abuse it. And yes, the internet has been designed to be very agnostic about what it’ll get used for. I think it’s a super impressive invention. And it’s very successful if we measure that by looking at how omnipresent it is now. And I’m even more impressed if I look at the age of the protocols and the design that powers the foundation of it, to this date. A lot of it has been adopted around 50 years ago. And the particular design choices scale so well, they pretty much still power an entirely different world 50 years later. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to do a substantially better job at something… But yeah, that doesn’t take away from other things and consequences. I’m often a fan of the analogy with tools. The internet is a tool, and very much like a hammer that can be used to help build a house, or tear it down… It’s not exactly the tool’s fault for what it gets used for. I’m now getting really out of line for this community, so I’ll try to make it short: I think abstraction is a very elemental design choice and what makes the internet great. The lower layers transport arbitrary stuff and that’s what allowed us to build phones, watch TV over it… Things nobody envisioned half a century ago. We’d completely cripple it in that regard, by removing that abstraction between the layers. And that’s what makes me think it can’t be the internet (as in the transport layers) where we bake ethics into. It has to happen at the top, where things get applied and the individual platforms and services reside.

I’m sorry, it’s way more complicated than that and more a topic for a long essay, and lots of it wouldn’t be very “casual” to read, as you said. I don’t think it’s a sad story, though. It’s just one taking place in the real world, where things are intertwined, have consequence and things often turn out in a way no-one anticipated. It’s just complex and the world is a varied place. And this is highly political. I agree.