Do they have this saying in France: "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" ? These days, everyone seems so intent on breaking what we have that at the end I'm not sure what we're going to have left.
Or how about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?" It's not like the internet has suddenly changed. It's basically been the same for decades in terms of ease of access to content. They say it's to combat fraud, harassment and protect children. Who was doing that in the 90s? Who was doing that in the 2010s? No one. Society didn't collapse. Children didn't turn into depraved fiends when they grew up. What changed?
I think that's besides the point. The social media boom (FB, Twitter, Insta, TikTok) was a point of no return for the internet, stepping out of its "only nerds spend time on it" reputation. Nowadays, everybody and their grandma can be taken for a ride by bad players on the internet, because (imho) let's face it, most people are like deer in the headlights, they just can't tell bad stuff from good on the internet.
The internet becoming such a phenomenon with the "unbathed masses" put it on the radar of the regulators much more than in the 2010s, and of course the 90s when only nerds were on it (myself included).
It's like new designer drugs. When only few people know of them and use them, they remain legal until they become popular and people die from overdoses.