If you work at McDonalds, you probably fed a soldier or a weapons designer, or CIA field operative. You'd have to drop out of productive society entirely to escape this dynamic.
This dynamic seems to give an advantage to corporations who have a systematic, always-full pipeline of patent applications. The barrier to entry for a single inventor for filing a patent is pretty large.
This is probably true, but remember that the single inventor has the option of publishing the invention rather than filing a patent application. The publication will then become prior art to any later filed patent application by another. The inventor may then file for a patent on the invention within a year of publication, but may have to overcome significant prior art that has arisen in intervening time (i.e., between publication and filing). For a number of reasons (that I'm not going into here) this may not be the best strategy in most, or possibly any, situations, but it does exist.
If nothing else, cyberspace can be delineated economically.
In meatspace, the economic leverage of a traditional business is scarcity and the leverage of traditional parasitic distribution business is distance. The economics of cyberspace can be based on neither of these things, because once a single instance of something is created, it is everywhere without scarcity. Traditional business attemts to create artificial scarcity and distance, but this is madness.
I have a DVD player, and a broadband connection. Without getting into something (cable, set top streaming, torrents) for which there are investments in time, energy, and money, there is no legal way for me to watch the second season of game of thrones.
Once I get into something, there's a lot of other content available. Cable is the least flexible. Streaming is buying into a walled garden which might disappear in a year, or change TOS, or some other distasteful eventuality. If some popular show drives me to piracy, and I make that investment of time and energy, then that's how I'm going to get all the rest of my content from then on out.
"...a feature, not a company," is high praise. That's how it should be, as long as that feature can be combined with other such features to create new things.
Very few users are well served by being locked into a single vendor's constellation of hastily slapped together aquihires.
