I dislike all those companies and net negative impact by all of them is undeniable. They do sell our "private" data, they do foster bad behaviors in humans. They monopolized whole industries and cemented bad ideas everywhere.

But if we would assess them overall - they indeed has changed the world for the better (in my opinion). The communication benefits provided by them to humanity is immense. Nokia's slogan - "connecting people" is the important thing, which force accelerated a lot of things on the planet. Yeah, maybe in some other timeline different companies may have done it better, but we are not debating hypothetical, we just observe what has already happened.

Facebook is the only social media company in “FAANG”. Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google have, I would argue, materially changed our lives for the better. They created the smartphones that are now ubiquitous and that opened up a whole marketplace of app based tech. They literally created cloud computing which has allowed more companies to focus on product ideas and get off the ground quickly. E-commerce (disrupting retail), streaming (disrupting Hollywood). Not to mention all the OSS and platform improvements that have originated at Faangs.

They have grown powerful and entities with power will often abuse it, and I would argue that regulations would be a good step in this direction. But arguing they haven’t had a positive impact on society is absurd.