Because our abilities to socialize, to express ourselves, to collaborate, and to construct our identities are all commonly held assets, as abstract as that is. There are so many situations and products whose value increases as more people participate. With the internet, these have potential to create mass swaths of value simply by gathering large amounts of people. Since bandwidth is cheaper than land and development, it lowers the barriers to gathering that large amount of people. So the tech cartel have taken control of the means by which those gatherings can occur and made them artificially scarce.