Some people think about distributed "Internet 2.0", I recently read about it in a few blogs. It will end the same way.
I think that there is one possibility to make this hypothetical "Internet 2.0" last a bit longer than current one. To consciously and by purpose go right into a dead end. Use technology so unhandy, difficult, and ineffective by design to make publishing hard enough to make people think before. No, not Java, that's not about systems speed and security
. There are probably a few modern open-source technologies which comply to these requirements (?Diaspora*?, ?GNU Social?).
Then to understand the idea and to use it, people would communicate enough to form community different than group of similar hashes in profiling database. The social-mechanical filters of such implementation should produce an effect similar to these terrible mail-based things operable by terminals from early 1990s.
Why I'm writing this: I had a bookmarks menu on my browser's bar with links to news sites I was checking from time to time. In its peak there were 20 or so. Today I deleted the last one. No commercial service would deliver news independently as their goal is not to deliver news, but to deliver advertisement. To make people buy more and operate blindly on advertisements, it is needed to artificially divide them while still making them think the division is not introduced externally. The objective of news will be to divide people, not inform what happens, even using "social media" in which knowledge of each users is illusory and manipulation of non-existing "public opinion" is simple.
So, the solution seems to be simple: Look here, then look there, for different news. One site, then another. But it isn't a full image - if all content dealers have goal to divide, they will not publish any news which don't help to divide. And this is the problem with... well, currently a whole modern journalism or publishing.
Finally, the list of observable aspects to divide people ends, so it is needed to create them from scratch. And this is what current Internet is doing. The political things here are secondary, the primary is to make another division, profitable for some companies.
P.S. Sorry for a bit chaotic post, yet another all-nighter.