There still is old internet, it's just that the new overtly materialistic and competitive internet shouts at people to make money or attain power. The old nternet is still around, it's just drowned out.
I do find that a lot of people decry the end of something without actually going and finding whether the thing still exists.
That is some rose colored welding googles you're wearing there. In the late nineties we had applets, activex, pages crammed with animated gifs, and the browser wars were in full swing between SUN, Microsoft, netscape, internet explorer. And then flash rocked up.
Again, it shows how the OP railing against over-design is so subjective. A lot of sites are meant to be interesting ways of showing information, or just people expressing themselves.
People complaining about the design of websites (and writing snooty blog posts about it on usenet) happened in the nineties too, even more so when flash took over.
Is that true that most Indian families live in multigenerational compunds? It sounds more of a upper middle situation to me, where a multigenerational family has enclosed or walled in land.
My unpopular opinion is that it is a long time coming. Smaller sites that do not have strong technical knowledge of security or IT maintenance are targets for bot nets and scammers to host on.
It's the same as arguing that Health and Safety regulation harms small businesses because they have to ensure the safety of their employees and customers. Or that it's not coducive to small businesses to have employment law.
Companies have had decades to switch to safe and secure online businesses, but the self-regulation never materialised.
Site owners are not going to be arrested willy nilly. All that is needed is to show that you have the administration in place to deal with complaints from the publis and enquiries from OFCOM. If you host illegal content, you have to have someone around to deal with it. If you host hate speech then you have to deal with the consequences. nobody has been prosecuted for saying the government is rubbish, but they will be for advocating physical harm on people in our society.
This will create digital management agencies that act as proxies to OFCOM, it may even create a cottage industry of remote working digital administrators.
These changes should be enbraced as opportunity, and fought when needed, but this isn't anything but law enforcement.
The conspiracy bunnies are hopping mad, citing some sort of tyrannical destruction of liberty, but it's not.
Sounds like it is possibly an automated script or agent doing most of this work accessing the VPN and SMTP server. Really shouldnt have any open mail servers anywhere.