[bdamm]

Your point is valid and, in the sense of TCP exchanges, true. However for most people "the Internet" is the experience of the services that are available to them via that medium. For the general non-technical, it has always been centralized services, and there seem to be larger more centralized services now than there were in the earlier times. The ability of companies to customize the user Internet experience into a reinforced echo chamber has unquestionably arisen.

But back to TCP. Governments have certainly improved their ability to monitor, restrict, and even manipulate that traffic flow. Is the Internet more free? I'm not sure.