Honestly the internet is fine, although contested with attackers. It's the WWW that contains these problems. Please don't throw out the child with the bath.
I've been trying to will a web of trust style system into existence for a while now, I lack both the marketing skills and programming know-how to actually create it though =)
Basically a way to see on every web page whether an actual human (or more) in your network has vouched for the content to be written by a person.
A crazy thought I had is that agents without a link to human identity might need to be treated as illegal. That human identity would be blamed the for the agent's actions.
This raises a rats nest of issues, but will we be able to avoid this necessity?
Theoretically, if you did trust your government, couldn't zero-knowledge proofs be used to allow such a system? I am a dunce about this stuff, so genuinely asking.
Example that seems like it should be required for all age verification systems, if linkability is addressed:
> Theoretically, if you did trust your government,
Trust not to misuse my data intentionally?
Trust to not lose my data due to incompetence?
Trust to not subcontract this service to some spying company like Google?
> couldn't zero-knowledge proofs be used to allow such a system?
They could, but will they really be zero knowledge or there will be some intermediary leftovers that aren't zero knowledge? See trust in competence above.
I think you've just thought of CAPTCHAs? Unfortunately, AI have increasingly become better than humans at solving the tasks we throw at them for such tests.
And how would you do that without dystopian verification checks?
The reasons why Youtube and Discord are so gung ho on age verification might be because these companies that sell ads and data have a monetary incentive for distinguishing humans from bots for their investors and shareholders.
If I were to chose I'd rather have a bot infested internet than a mass surveillance dystopia.