Edited to be more pertinent to the definition, as I've since read past the paywalled Wired article.
Content avenues
Being as reliant as we are on Google is an absolute pain. The big G feeds us whatever's most popular, and popularity doesn't mean good. You get dodgy and irrelevant pages sniping the top SERP results from legitimate sources. Sponsored content dominates above all else. And the advent of generative AI makes this way more complicated, as a text box aims to tell you your answers without clicking on a page. This kills the websites behind such answers and pushes more ads to make up for the lost clicks.
We need to break the monopoly using different sources, aggregates, and places to go for our content. Just About is a great start to breaking the mould, complete with good moderation, but it'd benefit from competitors rivalling with similar outlooks. Gaming Tribe perhaps comes the closest off the top of my head.
Social media was actually a good start until fake news skyrocketed and bots became an issue. I'm not sure what to envision, but down with Alphabet's giant is the main fix. If that means burning everything to the ground and starting again, then so be it.
Regulation
Driven by capitalist markets, there's no real regulation. Government bodies could step in to limit the amount of sponsors and ads we see. Currently, so long as something is marked as sponsored, it's fair game. What if there were limits to the amounts of sponsors that could appear on a page or at the top of Search?
Mass boycott
We're talking about an absolutely ideal world here and something that's never going to happen. We are partly responsible for crafting the world we live in. Companies respond to what we click on and how we navigate. If we simply stopped using services, switched from Google to Bing, or put down out phones a bit more, there's a chance we could influence those in charge.
It'd have to be enough people banded together to make a statement. Since we're talking millions, I can't see it happening, but it's an interesting thought experiment at least.
Enshittification-adjacent ideas
It's not just companies that need to change. It's us. Here are some more things that could better the internet landscape:
Quicker laws
Laws regarding online offences seem to take an age to get past government bodies. Despite the prevalence of revenge porn in the decade prior, the UK only made it illegal in 2014. Talk about dragging your feet. There's a debate surrounding just how strict we should be with the offence. Is South Korea right or wrong to put a five-year sentence on those caught cheating in games? No matter what laws we put in place, we need to identify the problems quickly and then organise legal punishment even quicker.
De-anonymisation
Most problems on the internet stem from the ability to hide behind an anonymous persona. The fact people can get away with saying or doing just about anything without being held accountable for their actions promotes toxicity of all kinds, from bullying and harassment to spam.
Tying accounts to a physical identity would create a deterrent in fear of punishment since everything easily traces back to the sender. This creates several privacy woes that I won't get into here. I disagree with almost anything that goes against the welfare of the common person, but living in one of the most surveilled countries on the planet, I can't help but consider that we should benefit from the lack of privacy already in place.
