From Manchester to Barcelona: Building a better story about the internet

A somewhat confusing title given the Cooperative movement traces its roots to the Rochdale Pioneers, also from Greater Manchester.

I want to vehemently disagree, stating that Zuckerberg deserves the spoils of Facebook's success more than any of the interchangeable programmers and businesspeople that worked for him.

...but I'm having a hard time making the same argument for all those who came before Zuckerberg, inventing TCP and GIF and even Geocities and MySpace.

With all those parts existing, wasn't it just a matter of time until someone would come up with something like FB, or better? Doesn't that make Zuck just as interchangeable as his database administrators and trademark lawyers?