It seems like having a website open and available on the internet is getting practically impossible to manage, with bots accounting for more and more traffic. AI has gotten to a point where it can circumvent just about any form of captcha, sooooo, what? Does "the internet just get abandoned in favor of some other, better technology that we hope crops up? Does it fade away? Do the real nerds start their own separate internet, and not let companies in? I donno, food for thought I guess.
In Snowcrash, the internet has been so abused that it is basically unusable and terribly unsafe, what with feral botnets and AI running wild.
So it’s just kind of abandoned by people in favor of the Metaverse. Funny idea, and if you look at the current state of Usenet you can see how credible it is.
I like how it’s described in Anathem, where it takes a specialized skill set and tools to extract signal from noise on the Reticulum.