I blame today’s Internet on the commercialization of the Internet

I tend to place blame for most of the predatory practices of Silicon Valley not on computing itself, but on proprietary computing itself, or on monetization, if you will. The problem is not so much surveillance as information asymmetry, or unfair informational advantage. This is a direct consequence of the fact that the technologies are being implemented in the for-profit sector. A modern website or mobile app is very intentionally designed to transmit signal (direct observations of behavior, and other actionable data) in one direction and noise (basically bloat) in the other. To forego any monetization opportunity is to leave money on the table, and of course that is a literal sin against the principal-agent principle. If we wanted search to be a utility, content to be a library, communication to be person-to-person, or platforms to come without vendor lock-in, we should have left the Internet in mostly academic hands, as it was in the early 1990s.