Big Tech seized publicly funded technologies while claiming the language of the commons

Evidence

It bears remembering that many of the technologies that form the building blocks of modern tech giants were first developed in the public sector, with public dollars, whether by government agencies or public research universities. These technologies range from the internet itself to GPS and location tracking. In essence, Big Tech has appropriated commonly held tools for private gain, while adopting the discourse of the commons to describe their gated platforms. For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, he described it as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the famous meme ‘public money, private profit’ and to Yochai Benkler’s commons theory; also recalls the 2019 TechRights framing of infrastructure. — connects to: The internet commons was ransacked by politicians before cloud capital’s inventions; Big Tech turned workers into cloud proles and everyone else into cloud serfs.; Big Tech’s control of digital identity is a deliberate US government political choice — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 303