I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money.
I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.
Er, yes that's fair I suppose. I wouldn't call it surveillance, as that has a worse connotation than I think what Google did deserves, but certainly statistical tracking of populations across websites.
I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.
SEO eventually led to the proliferation of link farms, machine-generated blogspam, and recipe sites that read like essays with FAQs. So it did cause perverse standardization of web content to some extent.
But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building.
I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.
I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.