The internet is built by misanthropic misogynists.

[BassinBas]

AIBU to think we need to either take control of it or shut it down?

Misanthropic is hatred of people.
Misogynistic is hatred of women.
So, people who hate all people, men and women, plus people who hate women, have built the Internet, and "we" (who is "we"?) must take control of it(how?) or shut it down (where? how?)

Please explain this further.

The whole point of the Internet is that nobody has control of it. Nobody can turn it off. Nobody can force you to watch tick tock or Facebook. Nobody forced you to use particular sites or stops you from viewing any legal content. People have choices.

It was built and created by idealists who had no idea how much abuse and evil is out there

Yes, I’m not sure the OP understands what the internet (or www) is exactly.
s/he perhaps more means some aspects of the big companies which use it, particularly some SM.

Who, exactly, do you want to take control of it?

The UK government's trying to take control of it, and is claiming jurisdiction over the entire Internet. Australia, Canada, the US, the EU...everybody's trying to do it, and it's making everything worse because career politicians generally don't have the first clue about how a global network actually works, and they're not concerned with any consequences past the next four or five years. It's essentially impossible to start an Internet-based service now without building your legal department first and then thinking about developers, unless you simply disregard all jurisdictions altogether.

The only way this gets sorted out is if the Internet has its own governance, separate from all geographical governments. That won't happen, though, because nobody will ever let go and modern politics has developed in a direction whereby local control = national power.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that's not what the OP meant.

It's a mass medium, just like many others. It's the combined knowledge of the majority of the world - billions of people... surely you know that those billions of people span the entire range of humanity, from the most beautifully kind to the most unspeakably evil and everything in between?

And considering that to consume all of the content on YouTube - which is just one single site out of millions - would take you something like 12,000 lifetimes, neither you, I nor anybody else will ever know more than the most infinitesimal fraction of the internet to be able to speak about it as a whole.

You may as well read Mein Kampf and, purely on the strength of that, denounce all books as wicked and hateful and demand that the entire publishing industry be urgently banned forever.

It's more that they had an idealistic view of human nature, and they thought that connecting people on a global scale would enrich humanity...and it did, for a few years; 1995-2000 was an amazing time to be on the Internet, full of discovery and astonishment at how easy it was to talk to people all over the world. We used it primarily for communication, and it was wonderful.

Their big mistake was fundamental - human nature turned out to be the stuff of nightmares, and as such it began a slow slide into the slop we see today as soon as the mainstream population got hold of it.

Now we have governments seeking to restrict that communication - look at the Online Safety Act. It essentially puts such a burden on services (even small ones) which allow people to actually talk to each other than there will be no more in the UK, and smaller sites will gradually die out because their succession plans have gone up in smoke. Eventually, the only options people will have to communicate with each other on the Internet in the UK will be the existing large US incumbents, and email. That's sad, and even more so that most people don't even realise it yet.

The internet was built to help US military command to survive in the face of a nuclear war. Is that idealistic? It was built with the very worst kind of warfare in mind.

No, that was ARPANET. It's a common misconception that it became the Internet; in reality, ARPANET was decommissioned some time around 1990 because the Internet made it obsolete.

Arpanet introduced tcp/ip protocol. Other networks joined it once the protocols made them compatible with each other. The network of networks was the Internet. Arpanet itself was then decommissioned. It was definitely the origin of the Internet, though.

Care to clarify or was this just posted as a wind up?

Actually, no. ARPANET was replaced by NFSNET, which had physically-distinct backbones. It used a lot of the former's tech, but it was an entirely separate network (although I believe it later had a link to ARPANET). It's NFSNET that was expanded to become the Internet, because it was much faster.

The key point is that ARPANET used a largely-centralised topology, which meant that it could never be generalised globally. NFSNET (and its connected networks) were mesh-based and later used BGP, which meant that it could.

I stand corrected (and will now read up on NFSNET)

Probably misogynists anyway. Definitely men that designed the iPhone. It’s too big for my delicate lady hands. I’ve got the smallest one but it’s old. Any new iphone is huge. for man hands.

Yup. Although while ARPANET was the first big network to use TCP/IP, it wasn't wholly responsible for its development. The International Network Working Group laid the groundwork for IP in the mid-70s.

Plus the Internet as it exists today relies on way more than just TCP/IP. DNS and BGP are just as crucial, as are the myriad developments in high speed networking.

I think that's very true. A lot of the groundwork was developed by a relatively small bunch of outright hippie nerds in the 70s and 80s who, if they did ever think about the long-term ramifications of what they were developing, were very much in the starry-eyed idealist camp. Most of them have since died but you can still see the attitude in the likes of Richard Stallman. Cliff Stoll's excellent book The Cuckoo's Egg is particularly interesting as it documents his role in tracking down a hacker in the 80s and, in doing so, marking a shift in his attitude from hippie nerd idealist to realisation of the impact the Internet can have.

To be fair, I've worked in the networking industry since before Tim Berners-Lee got his first NeXTcube and developed HTML. While I'm no starry-eyed hippie, if someone had told me in the early 90s about the Internet of today I really don't think I'd have believed them.

I'm sure that you could do that if you found the plug, OP.

We need to shut it down. All those kitten videos have rotted our brains. I believe the plug socket is located behind the huge filing cabinet so good luck with shifting that.

I was extremely angry when the Queen knighted Tim Berners-Lee.
Yes, what he did was clever, although probably based on existing technology, but with no safeguards whatsoever.
The internet affects the lives of the vast majority of people on this planet.
I am not too bothered about lack of social media, which is evil, but what about banking, finances and basic living, which now all appear to be online?

Berners-Lee invented a technology that changed the world. He absolutely deserved that knighthood. Sure, he did it by standing on the shoulders of giants but that's the same for all technological developments from the wheel onwards. Blaming him for the bad sides of the web is like blaming the inventor of the astrolabe for enabling ships to carry slaves from Africa to the Caribbean.

Plus I find your examples baffling. I can check my bank balance and confirm what I'm spending money on 24 hours a day. Back in the 80s I'd have to go to my local branch at a time when they were open which was nigh-on impossible as they were only open when I was at work. Social media has made much more of damaging impact on society than online banking has had.