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"... it would stand little chance against the competing platforms."

Little chance of what. It sounds like this is framing the web as some sort of commercial venture. And Google is the gatekeeper. A venture where they can effectively make sites "appear" or "disappear" from the web and they decide what the public will or not see. Google watches the traffic, shows what is "popular" and buries the rest. Everyone begs for Google's favour to show their site "at the top, on page one". If not an organic listing, then Google will let anyone pay to be "at the top, on page one" in the form of an ad that looks much like a search result.

That's a very dysfunctional "public platform". (The Google founders wrote about how dysfunctional it was to sell out that way in their 1998 paper announcing their new, alternative search engine.) No one ever agreed the only way the "public platform" would be useful is for a few big corporations to control it. That is a recent idea held only by those who stand to (continue to) benefit from its realisation.

News Corp is bad, Google is bad, Facebook is bad, but c'mon this does not mean the web has to be bad. If one cannot see the difference between "the web" and a few big corporations, then some "reframing" is defintely in order. The web is a medium not a destination. Google, Facebook and others trying to emulate them are all acting as middlemen on the medium.