I’m not sure speed was the issue, except possibly in terms of Free Software development struggling to keep parity with proprietary software development.

I think the major problem was lax antitrust and consumer protection laws, and/or failure to enforce them, especially by old and computer-illiterate legislators. Perhaps even worse, when they did try to get informed, the “experts” they decided to listen to tended to be exploitative tech bros instead of academics and others with more egalitarian/altruistic points of view.

Some of the policies we should have adopted, but didn’t:

• Internet connections should have had symmetrical upload/download and been required to abide by net neutrality. In particular, ISPs should never have been allowed to restrict residential connections from hosting servers because that’s part of why no widespread culture of aelf-hosting developed and people flocked to centralized walled-garden services instead (even as early as Geocities, let alone social media).
• “EULAs” should have been smacked down hard, immediately, and abolished. All the rights necessary to run software you own (e.g. to make the incidental copy to install it on your computer) are already specified in copyright law, so there was never any “consideration” offered by EULAs that justified forcing you to give up other rights in return.
• DRM should have been prohibited by law, as a violation of computer owners’ property right to control their machine.
• Section 230 should never have been a thing. You might think that sounds like a problem, but it would not have been if the norm had been for all that user-generated content to be self-hosted instead. It would have absolutely broken the concept of centralized corporate control over web services, and that would have been a good thing.
• Much more regulatory oversight and stricter limits should have been applied to the development of technologies like cookies, JavaScript and web advertising in order to greatly curtail tracking and profiling and thus preserve user privacy.