The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream, for example. The issue is that when someone attempts to do that kind of thing, they get sued and they end up owing BigTechCo millions of dollars. [0]
An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.
E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that the e-mail you're sending isn't garbage).
And that's pretty much the story across the board. The old Internet was overwhelmed by bad actors who would ruin everything. Facebook and Twitter house a lot of awful stuff. But can you imagine how bad it would be if we were all still using USENET and IRC?
And, yes I agree, it would make the internet great again.
I wish it was popular instead of random set of forums, mailing lists and reddits.
The walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really.
Is this still true when “telling who's a ‘robot’” is such a common thing to have happen? For instance, I've heard of at least one major platform both sending back quite a lot of UI telemetry and considering third-party clients a violation of their ToS; I haven't heard of strong action being taken yet. (I'm avoiding naming them both because I'm operating partly on hearsay and because I'm more interested in the general question.) Hasn't bigtech had a lot of time and motivation to advance “how to detect people who are using some weird software to talk to us”?
Simpler forms of technical barriers, like with the AIM protocol, were defeated in the past, but it seems like massively upgraded data backchannels, machine learning algorithms, and the new normality of silent automatic updates all the time might strongly favor a centralized defender. Plus IIRC the CableCARD wars didn't go so great, and there were presumably a lot of people motivated to save money on expensive TV packages, whereas risking losing access to all your friends for having slightly better control over something that's notionally “free” anyway sounds like a harder sell.
I don't think it's easy to defeat “socially required tech” + “automatic updates” + “machine learning” at all.
If the legal barrier went away, and someone surmounted the "unserious" (which I doubt) technical barriers to doing that, then the content providers would go out of business. That's arguably a good thing, but I suspect many people would disagree. The problem is the profit motive and financing model for what consumers want, not the degree of decentralization. Google didn't screw up the internet; people did, by preferring what Google offers.
The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects.
An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.
Perhaps it's a social one as well.