I think you need walled gardens for mainstream users. The reason is that the weakest link in any security system is people. Especially normal, pleasant, trusting, non-confrontational people. People like my grandparents, who just install whatever a guy who claims to be tech support tells them to install.
Should people like my grandparents have a good experience on the internet? Absolutely. Can they have it without taking away all their freedom to make mistakes? I don't see how. Any freedom we give them will be exploited by the sharks. Education is a good thing which can make them more shark-resistant, but not everyone will take it upon themselves to be educated.
Many idealists considered that a ridiculous idea.
> Incredibly so. But I have realized that the large majority of Internet users today have no point of reference to that time because they were either not alive, where very small children, or weren't paying any attention to what was going on. But for a brief time, humanity was being uplifted instead of being loaded onto digital cattle cars. There truly is a threat here--technocracy is turning America into a gulag and it needs to stop. No, I am not kidding. It's not just the Internet, it's all the companies collecting massive data "to better serve us" that are creating the . chains.
> I'm just glad I experienced that early period. Sunsite at UNC was the greatest. There were many true humanitarians back then. Today, we have the growing evil of Google and the Never-Was-Anything-But-Evil Facebook!
Yeah, it's been very sad to see possibility crushed, and people pervasively surveilled and manipulated.
That sounds a bit ignorant. Those mainstream users are the vast majority, they make a lot of internet business models worthwhile and made the internet the success that it is. Of course they also attract sharks as you rightfully say, but we should try to improve their experiences instead of denying them any sense or intelligence and putting them in walled gardens.