Email, YouTube, calendar, maps are all incredibly useful services we are lucky to have.
There needs to be a line or safeguard as well as an option to pay a reasonable price for these free services to keep your data safe. YouTube is unfairly overpriced for the ad free option as are most of these free services.
The option to pay today’s kingpin isn’t any recompense.
Just publicly fund the services that are useful to people. If "government" (i.e. us) can pay for a square for people to meet at, why not "digital spaces"?
And if someone's thinking "but government will use this data to surveil people!" - this ship has sailed, they have access to everything that's not e2ee, and even that's not guaranteed.
Government is practically the only body that can be expected to follow laws and act with people's best interest in mind. Some governments even do, just need a non-dystopian one...
And yes, there's commercial space in government/local authority-operated places. That's fine, just make sure to boot those that decide to install the equivalent of cameras and microphones on their storefront.
And the relied on VC money before that. It wasn't self-sustaining financially.
Have you checked OpenStreetMaps? It may lag behind Google or Apple for things like shop opening hours, but I'd choose it 11 out of 10 times over anything else when going hiking in the mountains. Feels like every stone is marked.
YouTube? This one is a tough call. It was generating losses for a decade, maybe a decade and a half. Perhaps it should've been a publicly funded service.
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