Except that the anti internet people in 1999 were right about literally everything and have been vindicated on every single point to a degree that surpasses even their own worst nightmares?

This kind of sloppiness is inexcusable. Why would you publicly announce something as dramatic as a live-streamed execution if you weren’t absolutely sure you wanted to do it and hadn’t already thought through all of the very predicable and inevitable blowback you would get? This makes it seem like they just kind of off the cuff floated the idea of killing someone on a live stream and then changed their mind when people were upset about it. Totally ridiculous, no matter how you feel about the public execution idea. No excuse to handle it this way. You need to go into something like this very thoughtfully, with seriousness of purpose and a sense of the gravity of the situation. Instead we get a casual announcement of a public execution and then a casual retraction on social media a few days later. Absurd.