I don't think it'll be that easy. Once people have to pay (or the functionality is reduced to compensate) there are plenty of alternatives waiting to provide better products for the same price if not better. The Google singularity depends on being a whole suite of premium product being offered for free, once that's gone it won't have the same oomph as a brand.
How do you feel about Musk owning Twitter? Because that's (depressingly) considered important to free speech, but the "free speech" crowd happens to cheer as Brosef openly censors things he doesn't like and promotes baseless falsehoods and whatever else tickles his whims. I don't want to assume you're in that camp, but 9 out of 10 "Keep govt out of my free speech" folk tend to celebrate Musk's particular brand of it and consider it "free speech" when he censors but oppression if it's done to somebody who agrees with them.
Do you think search would be free and open under the ownership of some private equity group or another billionaire with money to burn like Musk? Hell, do you think it's free and open NOW under Alphabet? They play dirty ALLLLLL the fucking time with search. If we brought Google (or some other search engine, or hell built a new one) under a government team we could just......pay the engineering team to build and maintain a product without all the games of profit and clout chasing that gives you relevant results instead of specifically engineered middling results designed explicitly to make you have to run another search (and all the other crap they do.)
I don't have a car right now (not in any rush, especially with the current market) and I'm a BIG defender of this point. On the bus, I usually have a book. I take Amtrak alot and having driven on plenty of out of town trips over the years - I LOVE getting to nap out after hopping on then getting some reading done, do some gaming, or just....stare out the damn window. Coming home I have a tendency of getting a bit drunk one way or another haha.
My thing with people's perception of Amtrak in particular is how if they applied the same standards to driving we'd have an INFINITELY more equitable movement infrastructure. Sooooo many people I talk to swear off Amtrak forever cause that caught one delay, in a number of these folk it's only an hour or two but that's enough to swear it off entirely. Meanwhile those same people will sit in gridlock for an hour every day driving to work without batting an eye, or pound the steering wheel once in a multi-hour delay while traveling then are just like "that's life." How come one 1 hour delay is a forever deal breaker but nobody (seriously) complains about that? It's just what they know so no level of inconvenience is too much and they're rather be stuck in a car for 6 hours in a jam than share space with others for 2 hours on a train.