I'm cleaning out my gmail folders this weekend, and went deep into the archive to 2011, when I got my invite to Google Music.
It's funny, because I just (November) moved all of my music out of cloud and back to local-only. Amazon was the last straw, when I tried to play purchased music, and was forced to listen to it on shuffle with other songs not of my choosing.
Anyway... there was a time when Google (ahem, Youtube) Music was set to be a game-changer. Imagine if enshittification wasn't a thing.
"The internet will bring us all together! It will democratize truth and information!" Was the manta of the 2000s.
20 years later and the exact opposite happened.
to be fair i would say that the internet largely has made information significantly more democratic & accessible. truth, not so much...
although i definitely do count the fact that you need to know how to spot & deal with misinformation and especially disinformation and differentiate it from valid information in order to safely use the internet, as a very big accessibility problem currently. Most people aren't growing up learning that on their own, and it's certainly not well taught.