It depends by how strictly you mean that "corporations got their hands on it," but to summarize my experience: Before, you went to stuff. Now stuff comes to y

It depends by how strictly you mean that "corporations got their hands on it," but to summarize my experience: Before, you went to stuff. Now stuff comes to you. I started off in the BBS world in the early 90's, with Internet being something available to universities and sometimes high schools. As it turns out, I lived in a university town at one point. The BBS world had a higher bar of entry, so it tended to attract people of higher IQ, miscreants, or tech nerds. I was the writing tech nerd (which hasn't changed, as I type here unironically). The intermediate between the Internet and the BBS messaging world was something like FIDONet, where your BBS would dial up and bulk import and export messages. Those of us who didn't have access (or know about) Usenet early on. The WWW killed the BBS. Prodigy and CompuServe and Sierra Online among others were something like hybrids, since they offered glorious (at the time) online worlds before they started weaving in the Internet like Prodigy did (my first e-mail experience). For example, you'd log in and read the news or play games, before the Internet connected itself to Prodigy. The early commercialized WWW was flat HTML, with flashy purple and popup-y things of a dubious nature all over the place. You had to be careful that your parents didn't click on something mean that installed something horrific on their Windows 98 PC's. On the other hand, You Went To Stuff. So while things like Yahoo and Webcrawler (was that the name of the browser) were nothing compared to Google, we didn't have a corruption of advertising manipulating search results on a grand scale (pay to play). Today, we live increasingly in a world where Stuff Comes To You. For example, there's a tightening of the screws of not just Google, but also sites (and especially, especially Apps) like YouTube, Amazon and others that try to use magic to 'guess' what you will like algorithmically. Let's stop for a second: is it in your interests for them (the corporations) to guess what you want, or is it in the interest of profit-motivated interests? And if they ALWAYS 'guess what you want' at what point does 'what you want' become self-referential? And what someone else wants you to want? How long are they guessing what you want before what you want isn't being expressed by you anymore very much? And what about your young kids, how in the world can kids even want stuff from scratch without being manipulated by the 'what do they want'-type offerings provided by algorithms? I deeply miss being able to "Go To Stuff" without corrupted and manipulated search results, and I think a lot of younger people don't realize how much Stuff Goes to Them. Sure, Facebook and Instagram are obviously doing it, but there's something about the re-training of the human mind going on, here. I will stop before conspiracy theories get out of hand and I need a drink.