I think it is obvious to most of us who have spent any significant time online in our life. To be clear, We've been seeing them try to control the internet since at least the late 2000s. It was only after about 2015 that capitalist interests controlled enough of the tech sector to actually start pushing with clear and tangible results.

I don't have references. Just anecdotally lived experience from being chronically online and watching. The internet educated many of us on how the world really works.

over the last two decades I have seen, in no particular order,

• Bot nets pushing bad faith opinion online
• Social media influencers being paid and supported to push disinformation
• Payment processors and web hosts punishing websites that don't conform to certain narratives.
• The rise of the algorithm and the suppression of certain ideas and facts
• Social media going public and old guard champions who built the platforms either being outed or being absorbed into the capitalist machine.
• Social media spaces being taken over by way of having old mods replaced for some TOS infractions that happened years ago.
• weaponization of the legal system against third party platforms like TikTok that are outside of the US's control.
• Search optimization
• ID laws
• Deeper Tracking of your online activity (currently just said to be used for ads but it's funny how often the Secret Service or FBI will show up at peoples doors in recent years when they say something online that was a little too spicy.

AI is the crown jewel of censorship. All of this breaks my heart. It ties all of these things together and ultimately centralizes what was an decentralized ecosystem.

importantly though, AI is the front end. It's the middleman to keep you from the information of the internet.

The other side of the coin, The other threat, The one that your average user wouldn't understand is just the datacenters. Forcing everyone to keep their website on a VM on some data warehouse control of the hardware.

Honestly, 20+ years of seeing this and I don't have a lot of hope that it can be stopped.

I don't know how to explain all of this to the average person.

The only thing that comes close is super childish. "They stole it." It's the only sentence that fits and it breaks my heart. It boggles my mind. The complexity of the systems, The power it gave us as people. They stole it.