The current state of "safety" online was actually a masterclass in growth, trends and thresholds of open platforms. Each interation could only bear so much. In

The current state of "safety" online was actually a masterclass in growth, trends and thresholds of open platforms. Each interation could only bear so much. In the dialup and early broadband phase, looking "under the hood" and learning about everything that was there was common practice. It was a 10 course meal daily for the life-long learners. Up until 2000'ish, there were only "certain types" of people online, with trust and integrity being self-regulated and intact. Between 2000'ish and 2007'ish, we saw substantial growth of broadband and wifi, expanding the userbase further, while attention was starting to be paid to internal security. Enter the ad explosion of popups, the occasional virus exploit and post-dotcom wisdom (/s) of the economists, and the self-regulating model erodes practically overnight. The smartphone bubble is where "all types" had access to the vast trove of resources that we used to call an information superhighway. Fast-forward to the present and when you open the hood, theres now several yellow warning stickers (idiot alerts) and all of the doors internally are starting to be locked as common practice. It looks like the modern crux of safety is the mix of three types (there are more) of fundamental operations of open platforms; (almost) full trust backends/platforms, self-regulating models and software packages (the bulk of OSS, linux, etc) and the current full lockdown approaches to research, exploration and security. I guess we can officially say "the more the Internet changes, the more unrecognizable it becomes", but data is still the most valuable asset and will most likely migrate to "safest path routing", rather than using the "three billy goats gruff" model that the Internet has become.