The dumbness, ineptitude, incompetence, greed, etc, characterizing how the WWW, the media, and communications industries have developed in recent decades is not really a new, surprising, thing.
How badly and dangerously it has been handled is something one would have expected, based on how thing have gone before, and how the major players, both public and private, have always conducted their affairs here, going forward:
"In regard to the critical issues of monopoly, free expression, and individual privacy, the advent of the telegraph posed new problems for which nineteenth-century American thought and institutions were unprepared." Starr
See his work for how American thought and institutions handled them.
my paraphrase, of Tocqueville
"A democracy cannot regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles."
my paraphrase, of Tocqueville
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