https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence. So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence. I wish there was a third way that we could crowdfund a platform without making it beholden to any specific set of donors.
That wouldn't fix the problem. Ultimately, somebody has to decide & implement what goes into the ranking algorithm that determines the search results that people see. That person has significant power, and will be both decried by intellectuals who feel like they're on the losing edge of the power dynamic, and courted by donors/lobbyists/etc. who wish to gain some of that power. If it were funded by taxation, you would see the same distrust that the FBI and NSA face today (both of which are funded by taxation). If it were crowdfunding, it'd be exactly the same problem that Google faces today - Google's AdWords auction essentially is crowdfunding, and if you give Google money, you get to influence the ads shown on some subset of queries. (Try it - you can get started in 10 minutes for a few bucks.)
What would fix the problem is if people didn't blindly trust Google, and instead researched in-depth on a number of competing search engines. The article alludes to this - Google's power comes from monopoly, and competition is the way to negate that power. But this only fixes the specific case of Google - if you broke up Google into many competing search engines, then Facebook would simply become the 800 lb. gorilla of how people get their information. Break up Facebook, and it becomes Reddit. Last century, it was ABC/NBC/CBS, and before then, Pulitzer and Hearst (who were a lot more unethical than Google was...Hearst started a war so he could sell more papers).
You can't avoid power, you can only understand it, and perhaps manipulate it so it serves yourself better.
So yes, you cannot avoid power, but you can distribute it or shine a light on it.
This isn't a comment on the ethical nature - just that I don't believe there was any point where you could choose between commercial drivers to the growth of the "information system", and any other approach that would have resulted in similar growth. If the commercial explosion on the web hadn't happened, we wouldn't have anything like the same scope as we do now. For good or ill.