By "own" it, does that mean speculators who have coin in wallets, or the open source maintainers whom have influence, or both?

Either way, the only way a coin or chain has value is by people participating in it, whether that's buying, transacting, mining, hosting nodes, or developing.

In fact, the system is so open to competition, you can fork a chain and take all its existing data to support your new network. You can't do that with Facebook, Uber, or Paypal.