We had a "smart person only internet". Then it became financially prudent to make it an "everyone internet", then we had the dot com boom, Apple, Google, etc bloom from that.
We _still_ have a "smart person only internet" really, it's just now used mostly for drug and weapon sales ( Tor )
For some group of smart people, there will be a group of smarter people who want to dominate the The people they designate "the stupids".
The internet was a technological solution to a social problem. It introduced other social problems, although arguably these to your point are old social problems in a new arena.
But there may be yet another technological solution to the old social problems of monopolism, despotic centralized control, and fraud.
