And your car is powered by corporate gasoline. And Tim Berners-Lee was using a corporate NeXT box. There is still a degree of freedom that Internet provides, and it's our duty to keep it at the same level or greater.

They would love to, but they know that wouldn't work. Those companies (and many others in many different countries) control some of the possible mediums on top of which the Internet can sit. The Internet is a concept, not a bunch of cables and hardware, and that's what makes it so resilient. People would find a way.

Government controlled actually, as AT&T and Verizon are government protected monopolies. Much like the largest banks, they're merely an arm of the US Government pretending to be private.

And then when you examine eg China (arguably the largest Internet market), it too is completely government controlled.

This comment is a great example of what I call 'cynical/naive'. You're trying to be cynical but putting forward such a naive, simplified view of the interrelationships between those companies, the relevant regulatory bodies, legislators, local/state governments, lobbyists, market competition and lack thereof, steak dinners and whatever.

The tier 3 internet business of these corps is different from the consumer internet business. The consumer internet business's legal monopolies aren't so much an arm of a big federal government as they are completely dominant over thousands of very small local governments, where $50k of local access TV funding will buy you exclusivity because those governments have been squeezed for funding for the last 10 years.

It's also not really comparable to the way things work in China, except insofar as 'corruption and imperfections exist' in both cases.