To me, he definitely does symbolize the same, though I don't think it's fair to pin all the blame on him. People make mistakes and there are a lot of factors in

To me, he definitely does symbolize the same, though I don't think it's fair to pin all the blame on him. People make mistakes and there are a lot of factors in play. Also, to Doctorow's credit I do think releasing through creative commons and touting remix culture is admirable. That said, holding onto the scrappy tech-rebel free internet idealizer persona of early 2010s is just silly today, and those who do it look like fools. You can't just treat the fact that the big tech companies "went bad" as an incidental that can be fixed. The implicit promise of the early internet idealizers was that big tech companies were good because they were tech companies and that big copyright holders were bad because they were IP owners. This has been proven ridiculous. I think now is the time for honest people who idealized the internet needs to take a few big steps back and reexamine their premises more deeply than just whinging about needing regulation for "big tech" so we can get back to our anarchist cyberpunk future and start giving some more respect to the people who they considered backwards ten years ago for not being excited about the newest shiny thing.