It has been ruined by profit.

It's a minority of toxic behaviours that has ruined it. Most corporations cargo cult what successful corporations do.

I don't get your point about governments, though. I could see an argument about US lobbies pushing the US government to enforce anti-circumvention all over the world, maybe?

> We, the people, built the internet, and as usual it has been ruined by governments (censorship)

Unfortunately, we the people also failed to keep the worst elements of society contained until pressure all but exploded.

The various censorship advocates would have had a far harder game, had Pornhub been more responsive to victims of involuntarily filmed material, Facebook/Meta been more responsive to Russian propaganda, Islamist terrorism, lynch mobs and god knows how much other shit ran rampant on their platform, had Reddit been more responsible in containing hate speech...

And it's no wonder that the EU eventually was fed up. Our attitude generally is, okay, we notice there is a problem, and we offer sometimes years to large actors to clean up shop or else, and only when there still is no action, then we bring down the hammer.

Frankly, I can't even count how many explicit warnings our authorities gave to Big Tech.