In his book “The Internet is Not the Answer” Andrew Keen says that the internet started well in the 1970s and 80s when it was controlled by publicly funded technologists who worked for scientiific advancement and national security. The rot, he says, set in during the 1990s, when control was ceded to commercial internet service providers, triggering what he says is a lack of common purpose, perhaps even soul.
The digital revolution, Keen argues, has served only to fuel the wallets and egos of a white, male, middle-class few. Not only are human values being discarded in favour of winner-take-all economy, but it is destroying more jobs than it is creating. Amazon has eliminated high-street bookstores, digital cameras have killed Kodak, Uber threatens traditional taxis etc. It has also to be said that there is a perception that the leaders of the digital revolution are (autistic?) geeks, unpleasant to work for and unaware that they are supposed to be serving human beings. They are not known Epicureans!
On the other hand the internet has a huge role in education and supply of ready information, and it has been a blessing as weel as a disruption. It’s only twenty years old. The founders of the innovating companies will die, and maybe their successors will settle into workaday corporate mode, like every other corporation in history, swallowed up or bureaucratized. It’s too soon to make a final judgement.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the corporatisation of the internet. The fact is that with online services, unlike manufacturing or energy production, start-up costs are very low, meaning that it is very easy for new competitors to enter the market. There are a plethora of different search engines, encyclopaedias, messengers, blogs, video-sharing websites and many other services. As for the ISPs you mention, even that is a competitive market. Here in the UK the main ones are Virgin Media and BT, but there are many others as well. In fact, I would argue that government regulation and spying by the NSA is far more of a threat than anything coming from the corporations, who cannot survive unless they provide a good service.