No, they wouldn’t. They’d just own some servers. And in the meantime, other instances would appear. To own the fediverse you’d have to completely control every web server in existence, halt production on new web servers and somehow find a way to make open source software licenses invalid, buy then patent, then remove all the existing fediverse software types, somehow repeal ActivityPub as a standard and then make it all illegal across the entire world.
“any big tech company can just buy the entire fediverse if they want to”
They literally can’t.
If someone bought every instance in the Fediverse, they would technically own the Fediverse.
That just sounds like a smart way to milk dumb but rich billionaires by creating new fediverse instances each time they are willing to buy them.
No, they wouldn’t. They’d just own some servers. And in the meantime, other instances would appear. To own the fediverse you’d have to completely control every web server in existence, halt production on new web servers and somehow find a way to make open source software licenses invalid, buy then patent, then remove all the existing fediverse software types, somehow repeal ActivityPub as a standard and then make it all illegal across the entire world.