It's 100% possible to publish a game outside of Steam. There used to be a publicity advantage to being on Steam but is that still there now that Steam is 99% slop?
There are successful indie games that only entered Steam late in their lives.
I know there are some long-range licensed fixed radio links run by hackers here, and others that are using equipment that doesn't require a license (ISM band WiFi). A local hackerspace recently for some reason got a redundant internet connection via long range WiFi to a not so local data center, increasing total uplink from 1Gbps to 2.5Gbps. I'm not sure why they did that but it sounded cool.
And nowadays we think of Sesame Street as wholesome compared to today's content. They may have optimised attention but they were delivering positive-value content. That's not the case any more.
Apply the same technology several layers deeper. Stimulate the novelty or sexual attraction or general reward neurons. Stimulate the thirst center in a Pepsi ad.
They have information barriers to keep the non-sociopaths from understanding the horror they're working on. Military forces do the same thing. Even the German train drivers didn't know what kind of facilities their trains were going to or why.
Fortunately that particular extreme scenario doesn't seem likely. Radiance scales with the fourth power of temperature, and we're not filling the atmosphere with Venus levels of sulfuric acid. Our CO2 output will be self-limiting when it kills us and we stop outputting it.
But they're objectively inferior to the real internet and nobody uses them. People only use Meshtastic to say "hello, I'm using Meshtastic!"
A cool idea would be to build out an ISP to a small set of hub locations using leased lines or illegally placed fiber something, but that will get expensive.
I heard someone have an idea to use a drone to lay illegal fiber across city rooftops.
The European parliament voted against letting Facebook scan private messages. It passed anyway because for some reason it's set up very undemocratically. A majority vote against it wasn't enough to block it.
The people who wanted the law were the heads of every EU state, so they could pass it with or without the EU - that's probably why it's set up like that - same reason the UN is quite powerless.
Young people are drinking much less alcohol now. Some people call it a crisis. It's probably related to the reason they date less and have less sex and do less of all the other things you're not supposed to do but people did anyway, and that reason probably has something to do with social media taking their attention instead.
If it's really that good, you'll pay for it with the money you saved in advertising. You're paying for the ads, don't forget. Plenty of people used to pay for things like woodworking classes, back when there was money. Doing a woodworking class in person at a woodworking shop will teach you much better than youtube.