>What's different? How do we get back to how it was before?

Elect people who regulate business and break up closed platforms. That's what different. Happened to TV too. In the early 1980s TV programming was regulated. Program-length commercials were banned, host-selling was banned, etc. Then Reagan put Mark Fowler in charge of the FCC who thought TVs are "toasters with pictures" and the free market should handle it and you got modern ad-infested, anti-consumer TV.

Gaming hardly was ever subject to any rules to begin with because it grew up after that shift. There's no great mystery, you hand your society over to unaccountable megacorporations and the market and you get exactly what anyone on the street would have told you would happen.