[wahern]

  Does Zuckerberg have more merit than all the people who
  invented the Internet in the first place? I'm pretty sure
  the net worth of all those people don't add up to 0.1% of
  Zuck's ($74 billion today).

How to judge merit is a separate issue. Whatever the value of all the other contributions, it's Facebook that attracted the most money in the marketplace--one of the most common ways to judge merit in our society. When people discuss the [lack of] meritocracy, usually the issue is whether, how, and to what extent people are rewarded for their individual actions as opposed to being rewarded for their status or associations.

Zuckerberg may have profited by standing on the shoulders of giants, but to the extent that the environment was meritocratic those were shoulders anybody else could have stood upon had they chosen, not shoulders that preferred Zuckerberg over someone else equally situated. Of course, not everybody is equally situated, but that has nothing to do with the merit of Facebook over TCP/IP.