This is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.
But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one.
But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill.
The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.
Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place.
A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids.
Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth." [1]
Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy." [2]
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-cu...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.