Comment by redleader55
1 year ago
Initially the internet was a chaotic place where anything was accepted. This stopped around the early to mid 90s. Then the pendulum swinged the other way and governments started imposing more and more restrictions - from copyright, to actual information filters and now trying to dictate international companies what their citizen are allowed to see. Like any pendulum, it will likely swing the other direction soon.
Some things are pendulums, some things are ratchets. Generally, expansions of government power don't get reversed.
I'm not sure it's a pendulum. Some (many? most?) things don't swing back. Many changes are effectively irreversible.
It's not like fat-->skinny-->fat-->skinny ties, where there's zero friction for the pendulum.
The only way the net is going back to the old ways is if the governments of the world stop caring (good luck with that) or if end-user decentralization tools make a quantum leap in adoption, but even then I think you're more likely to see governments cracking down on that rather than just not caring.