Those were all centralised. I don't think handing most of the internet over to a handful of big tech giants is the same as democratisation.

For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.

Does Gemma belong to this list? Not that impactful

I for one would prefer to pay for services, than be psychologically manipulated into paying (more, on average) to other companies who are paying to make those services worse.

There's no free lunch. You're paying one way or another.