Many of them have not been for the good. First, there seems to be a growing departure from Internet's history of open protocols, published as RFCs. Many new protocols are being developed in an increasingly proprietary manner. IGRP, a trademark of Cisco Systems, has the dubious distinction as the most successful proprietary Internet routing protocol, capable only of operation between Cisco routers. Other protocols, such as BGP, are published as RFCs, but with important operational details omitted.
People forget that businesses have tried to run digital communications networks in the past.
IBM and DEC both developed proprietary networking schemes that only ran on their hardware. Public data networks were constructed by companies like Tymnet and run into every major US city. CompuServe and others built large bulletin board-like systems. But none of them offered nudie GIFs that anyone could download. None of them let you read through the RFCs and then write a Perl script to tweak the one little thing you needed to adjust.