Wait, let's keep using this analogy. If the World Wide Web was invented in 1991 and by 2002 no one had created useful websites besides marketing for scams, drug marketplaces and sites to pay ransoms to, and the energy consumption of the World Wide Web was the country of Argentina... Wouldn't the critics have a pretty good point?

Please see some of these sites I shared earlier:

https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.

https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn

https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested

Please see this with an open mind. And please see this from the perspective of someone not from privilege, from a third world country, or from someone facing an oppressive regime.

Money is freedom. And making that freely accessible to anyone from anywhere is important.

Yeah, and imagine further that people were bidding up the price of IP addresses in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them.

People did bid up the price of domain names at least in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them

New TLDs are a money grab as well. You're hoping that big companies like google buy your domains just to make sure nobody else has them.

Nonono, you're confounding the internet as it is now with the internet as it was 24 years ago. It's just the other way round.