Big tech is a race to the bottom in general.
Take social media. I know so many people in business and media who did perfectly fine before it. Now that it's table stakes, we all have to waste time on it. Great for Twitter and FB, but just a cost for the rest of us.
Or youtube and the porn sites. If they infringe, what are you going to do about it? They take it down, someone else re-uploads--a full-time job to keep it off, and they're purely on the honor system when it comes to royalties. It's not like you can sic your auditors on Google's server room.
Or ed-tech. So many school districts spending millions on VMs and tablets for every child, yet the academic performance is as mediocre as ever.
And it's like people have no concept of just how dangerous information is--like cracking the enigma machine in WWII. Google is probably sitting on enough info to ruin most of our politicians. What if they were inclined to action?
What if you need to build maps for all the world? What if you want to go to Mars? What if you want to build a payment system?
Small actors could not do that.
We are rolling the dice toward a level of social control unparalleled in human history, and we are doing this for marginal gains to a standard-of-living which is already quite high.
And it only takes one catastrophe to get that bad turn of government--even in a "democracy." It only took a few bombs for us to throw the Japanese into camps when that was clearly unconstitutional.
This is how it worked in the early days of the internet, when DARPA and universities developed the internet protocols, and used commercially available hardware to run their software.
Except that government is really just another company, much bigger and often less accountable, plus it can make its own rules.
There is nothing fundamentally different between a government and a powerful company. They both suffer from the same problems, and succumb to the same evils. If this weren't the case, then we wouldn't need unions for government workers. Governments also don't have competition driving them to increase efficiency or improve their service to "customers".
If the government were in charge, the Internet would probably still look BBS's from the early 80s.
There is definitely a role for government to help create and agree on International standards, and to create regulations to protect people, but pretending that handing this stuff over to them would not be a total train wreck in one way or another is naive, in my opinion.
Did you read my second paragraph/line? The government built the internet as it exists now (minus the corporate junk).
Edit: I realize it’s an unpopular question here, but other than it being cool - why do we need a Mars colony?
So why Mars?