These kinds of articles pop up all the time, along with all the "Web 3" ideas, and all of them seem to view the past with a sort of rose-tinted nostalgia, forgetting that the corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, i.e. grow into enormous ungovernable conglomerates and wield godlike omnipotent control over the flow of information.

As a matter of fact, this stink of sleaziness that permeated the early Web was so prominent and overpowering that it played a key role in the rise of these huge companies like Google. Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google just happened to be in a position where they were sitting on lots of cash and were able to run a search engine for several years with no ads or clutter or any of the other annoyances of its competitors, seemingly providing a free service that asks nothing in return. They made this part of their carefully curated public image, of being the hip and cool tech company with the "don't be evil" mantra. They probably burned through ungodly amounts of money doing things this way, but once all the competing search engines withered away and died and Google had the entire market cornered they grew into a multi-trillion dollar megacorporation and are now unstoppable and now all their services they provide are deteriorating because they have no competition.

Ironically, it was this false underdog narrative, the idea of the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever. And now it's happening again with lots of "Web3" companies trying to present themselves as the new champions, who will overthrow the stuffy old corporate tech companies like Google and bring us into a new era of the Web that is even worse than this one.