I hate to say it, but I do not see how else a nation state could act.

The goal of a state is stability. The free, open, anonymous global internet otoh is a force of change.

The west really liked that, back when it was useful to its geopolitical goals, but now, not only does it have outlived its usefulness, but also, it's suddenly being pointed at the west itself.

At least I do not see how it could be any other way. You cannot simultaneously have high-trust and low-filtering in a space.

I think a lot of confusion stems from the fact that this was actually always kinda the case. It was just not enforced by law, but by the fact that computers were weird, expensive and complex.

As the technology matured, these core assumptions started holding true less, until, eventually, we've ended up where we are now.

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This doesn't necessarily mean that we will have no more anonymous networks though. But they will be less global and less accessible.

Thanks to open weights LLMs, we will have more capabilities within them than we did in the 90s and earlier, but, we will lack the leverage of tidal proportions that social media held.

This, to me, sounds like the compromise to be found with the powers that keep the states we live in running.