Never brought any innovation? VP9, AV1, zstd, GraphQL, React, and many more were made/contributed to by Google/Facebook specifically to improve those services. We benefit from this as they release these programs/formats.
Programs and format are not research. Nothing new was invented, they’re just alternative to existing things.
They’re improvements on existing things, which is the basis for pretty much all research. A nuclear reactor is just an “alternative” to a coal power plant, but I’m sure everyone here would agree that the nuclear power plant is better. In the case of the video formats, image/video processing is literally part of computer science.
In the case of React, you could follow the breadcrumbs back to JavaScript, created by a capitalistic company.
