I've been involved with the Internet continuously pretty much since its earliest ancestor ARPANET days at UCLA ARPANET site #1.
I can assure you that the ARPANET and the Internet into which it evolved were NOT designed to provide a means for a handful of powerful AI firms to suck the world dry without permission or compensation of information en masse, that has mostly been put online for free as a public service, all to enrich the coffers and stockholders of those firms, while giving only lip service (if that) to ethical considerations, and giving the sites from which they slurp data the finger, while laughing all the way to the bank.
