the cases given for it not to be free anymore could be arguments for it actually being free, humans just dont live up to what we hoped. if there's freedoms then there are people who enjoy taking liberties. the problem is likely more the unpreparedness and unawareness of impact of new technology more than it being free to use. free to use means for anyone, including shit governments, corporations and others who dont necessarily want to get out of the thing the same as what it was intended for.
what you hope a technology will become when given away for free, and what it really becomes, thats 2 totally different things.
technology innovators should always be aware of this, and try to align the capabilities of their software to more specific and perhaps restrictive models to protect its users. rather than to give it for free and hope humans will be good with it. especially if there is an angle that will allow a single party to heavily impact its use by investments not available to others..
It is still fundamentally free, giving your data to google or facebook is a choice, a very convenient choice but there are competing platforms for everything they provide.
Governments have made every attempt to control or limit the web, but we have technologies that allow us to evade this, we have encryption, and cryptocurrency, and open source software.
Online communities of hackers still exist and thrive, way more than they did in 90s, the only difference is that the total population of the web has increased substantially, and most people choose convenience over freedom.
But for most people without the large platforms and tooling of those megacorps the internet is mostly useless. Where would they even start without Google search?
And people come to the internet to communicate and form groups, having a gazillion website fundamentally does nothing for this goal.
Even today we can see the attempt at a decentralized network with things like Mastodon but it is never going to take in any meaningful manner, because the centralisation aspect is exactly what people are looking for. It's kind of the forums of old roman cities. You need one big one to be able to accept everyone, having a bunch of small ones spread out in the city is not only useless but also completely counterproductive.
The only real problem with the megacorps is that they figured out better and faster than the hopeless idealists what people would actually want/need. So instead of having things that could be interoperable public utilities with a focus on standards, we have the wild west of commercial competition and monetary exploitation with ads.
All of this happened/exist because the internet is a naive and lackluster protocol. Without the massive commercial investment of those companies, it would largely be useless. The reason it took off is basically only because it was free, not for real technical merit (the same thing for Linux).
The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about.
Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.