The number of people here who dislike the post surprised me. Maybe it's a generational thing - people who've grown-up with a commercial internet probably think of it as a huge benefit; people who started using it before that are more sensitive to the way it has been warped.

I encountered the internet in about 1985, while I was working for Olivetti, who had a batch feed from the UK AT&T headquarters, across the Thames. I connected from home in my spare time via a UK geek forum called CIX. I connected using a 1,400 baud acoustic coupler (they still have some in museums). It was necessarily text-only, and was populated mainly by programmers (back then we didn't call ourselves "systems engineers"), pilots, D&D enthusiasts, and a mishmash of non-normies, e.g. furries, whom appreciated anonymity.

I could have used it to send email to relatives, but my relatives didn't have a connection. There were no browsers - there was gopher. It was largely person-to-person; I got involved in Usenet, which used servers, but importantly they were highly distributed, and mostly run from bedrooms. When browsers finally arrived there was no <img> tag. The <img> tag, combined with the ending of the ban on commercial use of the network, changed everything. Spam arrived, and never went away. Now most traffic is to or from a server (back in the day we called them "mainframes", and they were huge, and incredibly expensive to buy and run). Nobody put a mainframe on the internet, because you'd never recoup the outlay.

I can certainly see how the internet conferred great benefits; here I sit, after all, posting a message to a website called Hacker News. It has brought democratisation, in the sense that you no longer have to belong to a clique of tech nerds to use it.

But widespread network abuse has brought a wave of balkanisation that is still growing; that threatens the very principles on which the internet was built (anyone can communicate with anyone, no "special" hosts, etc.)

I don't really see the benefits of being able to order stuff from a website and have it delivered to your door; sure, it's quicker than sending a messenger-boy to the merchant, but that quickness is just an encouragement to impulsive purchases, which is really just a benefit to the merchant. (Of course, only today I took delivery of an online order). For most needs, it not unreasonable to take your time or plan ahead.

With respect to the "cars" analogy (which I choose to twist into "trucks"), the weight of traffic has now become just too great. Set aside arguments about global warming; I have a common lung condition (COPD). I notice the stink of a diesel vehicle that drove down the street I'm standing on a full 2 minutes after it passed (i.e. it's an almost continuous problem for me). I am considering moving home (which I don't want to do), but where would I move? Even small villages around here are no more than 500yds from some 6-lane bypass. The top of a mountain in some place like Switzerland?

Full decarbonisation of road traffic is at least 20 years away. And even then, they have to be charged somehow - um, power stations also run on carbon. Fusion is still at least 2 decades away.

OK, so with much fewer cars and trucks, we'd have to find another way to move stuff around; gee-gees seems a solution. Of course horses belch methane and cover the roads in shit; but at least you can compost the shit, to get "good stuff". And we'd need lots more of them than we needed in 1900; there are a lot more people.

I part-own a car, with my wife; I hardly ever drive, I'm a cyclist. I don't travel much. Being much more local - shop locally, live near your work, that kind of thing - might help a bit. But really I don't have solutions to either the internet's problems or the traffic problems. Having less people is really my best shot.