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I'm sorry but this analysis is terribly simplistic. Big Tech LOVES Intellectual Property, copyright, and specially patents. That's why these companies want to patent and extract licenses/subscriptions from everything that exists online. In the 90s, there were practically no large Internet companies (besides Yahoo!) and most technological infrastructure was decentralized - usenet newsgroups, IRC servers, BBSs, netizens movements, etc. Most technological innovations of that time were led by individual developers working for fun, as a hobby, or for mere survival.

While I'm sympathetic to leftist anti-big tech rhetoric, most of these discourses leave too many details out. You cannot create a false narrative based on misplaced assumptions, false narratives, and innuendos.

Digital rights were very important for the evolution of the Open Web and they should nowadays be considered as part of the human rights stack. Access to Knowledge (A2K) still continues to be critical for non-western countries, along with privacy and data protection rights.

Just because digital rights and the open-source movement were coopted by capitalism, that doesn't mean you should completely jettison them out. They are just a few pieces of a very large puzzle that must completed to surpass the conditions for the expansion of capitalism.

TL;DR: Leftists anti-big tech critics should read more marxist critical theory.

https://disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sovereignty-in-the-digital-age/