This is hyperbole. Yes, there is a small number of large corporations which have a lot of users. But the infrastructure of the Internet is still there, and is largely as unregulated as it ever was. It's just that it has become less visible in the enormous mass of people who use the internet in a "simpler" way.
> Er, Yes! I'd say no one back then would have ever wanted the internet to be as privatized, militarized, and censored as it is now.
Erm. The Internet is an explicitly military invention and without it's (controversial) privatisation, you'd be unlikely to have heard of it. It's not meaningfully censored outside of jurisdictions that already censors all other media extensively (DNS-poisoning consumer lines is bad and broken but really very low on the censorship-scale).
"They" can't. Stop the scare-mongering. If you're not a good terms with your local government, you have dozens of alternative jurisdictions to select from. Even if you can't find a single friendly government to setup under, The Silk Road stayed up for over two years. China isn't even pretending they're not censoring the Internet, and their well-funded censorship agency still has to play whack-a-mole with VPNs.
All controlled by about 5 corporations at the top.