I think you’re wildly underestimating the influence of those sites. And even beyond those sites, think about how many sites can only exist because of payments from ads served by those same operators. It’s true they don’t control the whole Internet, but they sure have a ton of power.

I also don’t think the level of control Trump will have over PBS is worse than the influence he’ll exert over mainstream media sites through the threat of legal harassment alongside his indirect control of the discourse on Twitter.

I guess mostly I remember the Internet in the days before it got so corporate, when it was wild and wooly, and all the sites were bizarre little labors of love created purely because someone just really wanted to post information about their Special Interest. (E.g., I had an old Tripod site that was just a detailed explanation of the shape of a module for a five intersecting tetrahedra origami model, complete with folding diagrams and descriptions of the approximations I’d used to simplify it and how the lengths related to each other. Then my hard drive crashed and I went to grab those files back from my site and discovered they’d deleted the whole thing because I hadn’t updated the site, which had never occurred to me because, well, it was just this info, it didn’t need updating. Those were the early days of corporatization.)

So when I picture a public-subsidized Internet, that’s pretty much what I think of. People being people, sharing information out of weird enthusiasm. I think it would work in practice because we’ve had that kind of thing before. Lemmy is honestly kind of a similar thing right now; it’s just that some kind, generous souls are paying for the servers, which is likely going to be hard to sustain eventually.

I dunno. It’s dark times for sure.