dkbg
Who said anything about the government stepping in to take over? I certainly didn’t say that. Something like Lemmy (and the Fediverse in general) isn’t government controlled, in fact it isn’t controlled by any one entity, which is one of its strengths. If you’re looking for a possible alternative to corporate or government control of media, you’re using one right now.
The problem is that Google has become a defacto default for most people. That didn’t happen just because people “decided” to start using it, the decision was made for them because Google has a great deal of money and power and can use that influence to essentially make the decision for people.
I would tend to agree with everything in the article. Be careful about calling anyone who downvotes you a bigot though…sowing division is ultimately not helpful. Canada was and is built on a very ugly foundation and some people will have a lot of trouble accepting that, but the people need to unite as a collective to make it a better place, not polarise ourselves (i.e. like the US).
Why should Google have control over the propagation of news? Everyone can still go to the individual news organisations’ website…yes Google consolidated everything into one portal, but maybe it’s time to go back to something less centralised, which isn’t under the control of a single corporate entity, i.e. the way the web was originally intended to work.