I agree with almost all of the frustrated comments here, and the premise of the article.
I was also involved with a major F50 that was warily forced to deal with various regimes trying to filter content.
But consider for a moment:
'Globalization' is having many nefarious effects on the world - and the 'openness' of the internet is generally only a mostly positive aspect from powers that are large and centralized. America is relatively free, and nobody 100x the size of America is going to come along and 'control your internet', and therefore potentially control your economic and political system.
The ubiquitous internet means that a small or mid-sized nation that is not a G7 is at major risk of having the almost the totality of their nation overturned by foreign powers.
Consider: Facebook, or Google, could very easily change electoral outcomes in many nations, possibly even by accident. A small change in their algorithm that suppressed some, and promoted others, an accidental ban of a political group, etc. - can happen. I don't suggest FB or G are interested in this, but remember they also do have relationships with the US Government, and it's reasonable for these nations to be very cautious.
Moreover, an open Internet allows fully malicious actors (hacker groups, bad international enterprises, bad governments), to do some really quite dangerous things to other nations, most of whom are too small to be able to protect themselves.
'The Internet' is the new 5th column if you will, and to some extent it can have more power than government or the Supreme Court in many nations. If 80% of a nation is convinced of some truth/mistruth perpetuated by 'whoever' on the Internet, well, then legality hardly matters. It has more revolutionary potential than perhaps any historical ideology.
Even on the economic front - Globalization means that all of the talent is getting sucked up like a vacuum into centres in the biggest economies. So many of the best go to America. So many European professionals flow into Germany or the UK - to their advantage.
Both of these issues come to head with issues like journalism - it's one thing if 'American journalism' is concentrating in a few American outlets, but imagine if your country was losing most of it's journalistic opportunity and that centralization was happening in another country - a large country like America with whom your nation may not have a great history.
Tax bases are a real thing - and though the Internet should in the long run provide more opportunity for local governments, in the present it's causing losses in tax revenues, or at least, those revenues created by new economies are not being realized locally.
Recognize that these issues are a problem, and that the erstwhile 'open internet' which positioned as a very positive and aspirational aspect of global development by American/Western forces, does not necessarily represent the same opportunity in the rest of the world.
So yes, so many corrupt and stupid leaders doing corrupt and stupid things to their own nations, but the answer is definitely not "Just let Google be the Ministry of Truth" for the nations of the world. Definitely not.