I suppose if I needed to make sure there was a public immutable record of something it would be useful. Like "I made this thing no later than this post"
But who would use it?
I can't see why you'd say that.
Governments (and private corporations) are not operated to faithfully serve the public, certainly not the public as a set of individuals and small groups of people. It's not that "government services are bad", but rather, than governments, even democratically-elected ones, are practically certain to wiggle out of the straightjacket of strict protection of individual needs and interests for legitimate or illegitimate "greater good"; specifically, they will not resist the desire and the interest to spy on you. And the potential for government abuse of private information is quite high.
"There is only one essential difference between a monarchy and even the most democratic republic—in the former, bureaucrats oppress and plunder the people in the name of the monarch; in the latter, they do it in the name of the people's will." - Statism and Anarchy
The core problem isn’t the form of government, but the concentration of power itself.
You're merely playing word games here. A person keeping another human being against their will is called slavery or abduction instead of prison. Similarly, it's only called war when it's a government doing it, otherwise it's called activism, terrorism, or gang warfare (note the overload of the term).
The main difference between a corporation and a real democratic government is that a government is accountable to all its citizens, instead of its shareholders. I understand that this is a difficult concept to grasp for US citizens, but the rest of us living in actual European democracies don't deserve your childish derision. No system is perfect, but don't make the mistake of thinking that the US government is the best (or even a good) example of democracy out there.
This is not a knock against private industry in general. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it harnesses corruption toward productive ends through private industry.
Nonetheless, it's unsurprising that people would take a chance at less-corrupt versions of key infrastructure. My preference would be to do this through charity, which worked pretty well for e.g. Mozilla for a while - but I wouldn't call other directions naive.
There are plenty of immature ideas about running human affairs going around. History has shown that a social contract obtained by popular assent is the only viable choice, unless you relish war, insurrection, terrorism, and social collapse [0].
Government is good almost by definition because we grant its existence on that basis of benevolence. Indeed one should be ready to defend good government and lay down ones life to make it good, including overthrowing existing bad government.
This was well established 80 years ago and we seem to have forgotten.
I know there are some around here agitating for tyranny and dictatorship. That in my opinion is the "childish view", a result of too much screen-time and a lack of life experience.
Would you be willing to fight for good government? [1]
Having the source code to a printer driver available is a completely different thing than being dependent on a platform, because all your friends and relations are using it.
Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services, which makes the article we're discussing ironic at the least, or complicated.