Its a darn difficult question. The "internet" is the first time humanity got a technology for information exchange that can scale arbitrarily. It creates a comp

Its a darn difficult question. The "internet" is the first time humanity got a technology for information exchange that can scale arbitrarily. It creates a complete graph that can enable data exchange between any two individuals (and of course an arbitrary additional number of devices). How this increadible technical potential got translated into social reality says more about society than the technology[0]. If the stack of applications that has been built on top of it has become dystopic it is because society had dystopia in its dna. The technology simply allowed it to be expressed, so to speak. By the same token, any technical tweak that maintained or improved this scalability would simply have led to an alternate dystopia. It may be counterintuitive but maybe the only internet that would actually be "better" would have been a more local / less scaling version. A more gradual transition might have given society time to adapt, develop some defense mechanisms and not be dominated by the lowest common denominator [0] Keep in mind that all communication technologies of the 20th century (phone, radio, TV) quickly degenerated and never delivered the utopia initially projected