Back in late 90s, 2000s, even 2010s, the internet was truly awesome. Only once governments started to get involved, by increasing the red tape and adding restrictions and whatnot, it became shit.
So I would argue that you are completely wrong. Yes, it might have been a bit of a wild west, but that is a good thing because you needed to have some smarts to navigate it and that filtered out the dumb masses that pollute it today and why we cannot have nice things.
I am not saying people should not have access to it, just that the less people there were, the better it was and the less attention it had by the governments. Which in turn made it much better experience than it is today.
But most people, actually, have not lived through those "early" days and cannot even comprehend how great it was back then and how crappy and restricted it is today.
You could argue that, but it would be idiotic. It would be deeply and deliberately ignorant of e.g. Facebook complicity in ethnic massacres in Myanmar. Cambridge Analytica. Youtube as an engine of algorithmic radicalisation. The continued extremism on what was once Twitter. Online anti-vax disinformation. QAnon. All of Truth Social.
You posit it as "people vs governments" but that is not the reality. There is a third force. "The people" don't run the internet any more. A few incredibly wealthy oligarchs control most of it, and this trend is strengthening. Elon. Zuck. Jeff. Satya. Sergey. Rupert. You know who I mean from one or two syllables each and that's telling. This state of affairs requires government inaction as power consolidates.
> But most people, actually, have not lived through those "early" days
I have been online since the mid 1990s, so whatever point you might be trying to make doesn't apply to me.
The idea that "Government red tape ruined the internet" is just nonsense.
So again, i argue that internet before facebook, instagram, tinder... was in its golden age mostly due to lack of government involvement and too many people being online.
The invasion of normal people onto the internet was the seed for handing the web to a small selection of companies, and a decline in etiquette which is now reflected in the real world (misinformation, political polarisation, bullying and group radicalism).
It was inevitable that regulation would need to come as soon as this group came online. Many regulations were postponed way too much, because politicians of the time didn't understand what they were dealing with.
There is nothing wrong with governments putting in regulations about child safety on the internet, so long as that's the real purpose (in the UK, this isn't it). It's not right for companies like Facebook to be misusing the data of child (nor should it be for adults either).
I really do not agree at all. The power consolidation that Facebook is a good example of is just not a government regulation thing at all. The opposite in fact. Government regulation being hands-off allowed the internet to become "5 giant websites that share screenshots from the other 4". And that they're largely uncountable.
The internet as it is today, with very little governance over the large websites that exist today, is terrible for the people who are online today. I stand by that. Removing regulation won't help, as the bad actors are already pretty much unregulated already.
The "mostly due to lack of government involvement" part that you abruptly pivot to in the second para is completely unsupported and does not tell a compelling story about how we got here. Try Cory Doctorow on "Enshitification" which does, and it's all about consolidation and large company leverage. The only way that government is involved is as a bystander who could have done something but did not.
I would argue that consolidation is the natural outcome of capitalism and growth, it will happen if there is no intervention. The fact that the growth came from "normal people" is not the most relevant thing. It merely reflects the thing going mainstream, no longer only used by nerdy early adopters. It's in inevitable consequence of growth past a certain point. Consolidation requires only that government is hands-off on a lucrative market, e.g. allowing mergers and acquisitions.
Further, I would say that these large companies use their power and influence to avoid meaningful regulation. And that they are largely unregulated now.
It is absurd to blame this current state of affairs on "government red tape".
Cheers.
Maybe those acquisitions should have been allowed, and maybe not. But the reasoning there is non-sequitur. The one thing simply does not follow from the other.