I don’t doubt something shitty is going to happen, but that would still be better, since Google would have to pay for fucking up the internet instead of doing it for free like now. And on the other hand, wouldn’t Google have to pay more than its competition combined for exclusivity?
Imagine Google pays Chrome 1 million schmeckles for exclusivity, if Microsoft and Amazon would show up saying they would also pay 1-1 million just for access, then Google would realistically need to pay at least 2 million for it to still make sense for Chrome. Something that used to be free for Google now is something that they need to outbid their whole competition for.
Twitter was bluesky before musk bought it, federation ensures that can’t easily happen to mastodon.
That’s it.