I have very little faith that it will be very possible to rewind to that point. Not because the technology of today is different, or even the legal landscape, but simply due to the cultural landscape being different. Pandora's box has been opened, and it cannot be closed.

To me at least, there seems to have been some cut-off point where nothing but money mattered, and someone realised that consumers will just take the abuse and you won't actually be punished that much, at least not to the point where it's not worth it if money is all you care about. I'm sure there were industries that behaved like this before (tobacco comes to mind), but now it's everywhere.

The aura of 'they'll screw me over for pennies' is ever-present. Even if there were legal recourse for stuff before, you didn't need it, because the threat alone was enough to keep companies in line. Similarly, the threat of a boycott could be enough for a company to switch course. Now they've discovered that for every person willing to take a stand, there are 1000 more who'll stick around, or be swayed by ads, or whatever else.

The idea that you're doing business to provide actual goods and services which does some good in the world seems to have disappeared. Now that is nothing more than a means to an end: the money. You don't open a business because you want to get into the whatever-business. You do it to earn the most money you can. I'm sure the ever worsening socio-economic climate has something to do with it.

We can introduce more consumer and worker protection laws to bring back some breaks on all this. Make the former theoretical punishments to businesses come back as actual punishments, which will hopefully make them behave. Doing it properly is hard. The culture of loopholes isn't going away any-time soon.

I think more penalties involving "you aren't allowed to operate until this is fixed" rather than fines would help.

Also, this is a pretty good take on a lot of related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmpwVCC2So