@dalias@lauren Yeah, and therein lies the rub... Annihilation would be somewhat disastrous (I don't think anyone would take seriously the proposal "We're going to eliminate Chrome tomorrow", or the same for Gmail, search, etc)... And at least in the US we don't generally have enough faith in the executive to operate any of this as a public utility (experts from Google et. al. had to go to the feds to bail out the implementation of healthcare.gov, not the other way around).
@mark@lauren Related: Note that I explicitly dropped the word "nationalize" from my vocabulary and did not use it here, specifically because we live in a world where that is just not going to be in the public benefit for the forseeable future.
But also, more broadly/abstractly, because "nationalize" in this context just means the exact same thing: assigning a different capitalist owner.
We desperately need systems where the concept of *public* operation is possible.