I think eventually we will reach a point where laws like the Online Safety Act become so prevalent that it is basically impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet across the globe. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years or so every country has its own version of the internet only intended for their own people.
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet
We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.
One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.
The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
I'd say that it's entirely the other way around: they stuck to the practical convenience of solving the problem that they had in front of them, quickly, instead of analyzing the problem from the first principles, and solving the problem correctly (or using a solution that was Not Invented Here).
Go's filesystem API is the perfect example. You need to open files? Great, we'll create
function, you can open files now, done. What if the file name is not valid UTF-8, though? Who cares, hasn't happen to me in the first 5 years I used Go.Then make it valid UTF-8. If you try to solve the long tail of issues in a commonly used function of the library its going to cause a lot of pain. This approach is better. If someone has a weird problem like file names with invalid characters, they can solve it themselves, even publish a package. Why complicate 100% of uses for solving 0.01% of issues?