With that you mean that in tech the value extraction has been in the hands of only a few players (which is exactly what you'd expect in a global market with near-perfect competition. To some extent you could say the entire cause of this is that governments allow multinational companies to exist at all).

Value production for the internet was mostly done for free. Both where it comes to end users and the hosting they needed. And yes, sometimes by "wasting investor dollars" (of course investigating new things, wasting dollars, is exactly what investment is supposed to do, that it does that is why investment is allowed).

And ironically this goes multiple steps up the value chain. Users and mods are complaining to reddit that they don't "pay" them enough. Reddit is complaining that Google/FB/even OpenAI at the moment don't "pay" them enough by trying to take in ads directly, and presumably training their own AIs soon on "their" data. Elon Musk is complaining that he's providing data for free (it's even costing him some money, even though not anywhere close to the amount he implies) and not getting the dollars AI companies are attracting with "his (users)" data.

The real value in OpenAI is that Google's position is that they are the arbiter of where users go. Users decide where to put their attention 99% ... and Google 1% (and FB 0.1%, and reddit 0.01%). But OpenAI is a serious threat to Google's 1%, because it can give better answers and therefore will have the perfect, most expensive, place to put ads if things keep going the way they're going.

For Google this is a lose-lose proposition. Either they win, get to keep their position because they get the best Chatbot. However, running this chatbot is much more expensive than Google search (and they will need to restart their revenue optimization with angry shareholders screaming at them. There is no adwordsLLM yet). So they'll need to run a much more expensive internet scrape on a regular basis, and figure out how to run ads on this new platform, just to maintain the position they currently still have. Shareholders don't care, they just want to see Google's dollar amounts go up 20% per year as they did for a decade. And if Google doesn't do this massive investment? Well, they may lose everything.

Funny how apt the old Futurama joke has become "the internet has always been about the free and open exchange of somebody else's ideas".

Futurama meant Napster. But Reddit has exactly this business model. Google has exactly this business model. Twitter ... etc. I bet the tech sector has actually made more money on this than even the most absurd claims of the RIAA say Napster has cost them.