I think it's questionable whether they really have.

Especially the openness and bottom-up character of the W3C. They wanted closed source DRM running on people's computers despite presumably strong opposition from the bulk of the ordinary members, and then it got pushed through, and who knows what's in that software.

It's better than Chat Control I suppose, but it's the same sort of thing, i.e. foreign software doing who-knows-what running on a user device.

Today it is far too late.

The internet is more alive than ever which also means nefarious actors of different plumage are more active than ever there. It used to be a quiet country village where people had their front doors unlocked and everyone knew each other, where the unwritten etiquette was known and abided by by everyone, where the local police constable was mostly busy finding lost dogs and cats. Since then it has grown into a bustling metropolis which never sleeps, never rests, always thrives but also which is jam-packed with petty thieves, robbers, muggers, gang warfare, corrupt politicians, corrupt police, corrupt everything. People lock their doors or they get burgled, they keep their hands on their pockets or they get picked, they know they can not just blindly trust the authorities because those have been taken over by the corrupt politicians. Some people long back to the quiet times of yore and write long stories about it, others realise the potential technology gives them to recreate something resembling the old 'net. They are the ones hosting their own services, running their free software servers and mobiles and laptops.

The internet is not dead, it is thriving.

Why would the internet be dead? Like, you are using it to read about it right now?

>so many problems Such as? I can only think of the centralisation of rendering engines and website visits, both that emerged out of freedom and can be improved through local governance