Counterproposal for actually useful, effective Internet regulation that would actually do something about the negative effects of "social media": 1. Ban paid a

Counterproposal for actually useful, effective Internet regulation that would actually do something about the negative effects of "social media": 1. Ban paid advertising, of all kinds, everywhere, without exception. It's an incentive to optimize for engagement, and it's the root of basically all evil on the Internet. People are just gonna have to pay for things. I do not give a fuck if it destroys Google or whoever. 2. Ban collecting any information not intrinsically necessary to deliver a specific Internet service that the user has actually asked for. That includes the user's name. Require zero-knowledge attribute-based authentication of anything that specifically needs to be proven. Require accepting cryptographically anonymous payments. Even if specific information is necessary, you are just going to have to shut down until you have the infrastructure to collect it without getting anything else. The ability to get this information is another incentive to optimize for engagement. 3. Ban sharing even the actually necessary information, except as necessary to cooperate to provide some service that, again, the user has actually asked for. Considerable work involved in defining what "sharing" means, but something a hell of a lot tighter than the GDPR. And notice that I didn't say "sharing without opt-in". Unless you actually need it to provide a service to the user, you can't do sharing even with permission. 4. Just in case there are some incentives left, ban selection/recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement or for anything that smells like engagement. You can have an exception for a user getting their own recommendation system from a third party that shares no control with the actual providers or carriers of the content. 5. Ban terms of service that prohibit scraping or third-party clients for centralized services. Consider requiring that everything over a certain size have a stable API that can do anything the regular UI can. This makes it harder to force people to keep using manipulative stuff. 6. Ban carrier NAT. Require IPv6 to be turned on wherever IPv4 is turned on, with every retail subscriber given least thousands of stable addresses. Ban "no servers" contracts. Ban "safety filtering" by ISPs unless customers can disable it trivially. Ban traffic prioritization by ISPs. This may allow the Internet to (slowly and uncertainly) heal back toward being a truly decentralized system. 7. Actually enforce your laws against fraud, unfair business practices, etc. ... or you can just fuck around and make kids' lives miserable, I guess. They don't vote.