I wouldn't be so hasty to call time of death on the internet. We are all of us here discussing this matter, after all.
More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous.
World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany.
All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace.
The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win.
By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge.
During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters.
What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is.
The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them.
But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented.
The internet is not to blame.
The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users).
It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted.
The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively.
The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now.
If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it.
Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast.
I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it.
There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches.
The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far.
I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet.
It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict.
People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know.
and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona.
I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network.
There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.