Nonsense. We're currently doing nothing, equivalent of no route at all. We have regulations for many other areas - and for good reasons too.
Saying there is a playing field is not at all totalitarian, and shouldn't really be seen as that extreme of an idea.
I also dont see why a notion of "freedom of chance" could not go both ways: "the totalitarian route" would offer equally little _chance__for the individual.
It's not an easy answer, but an important discussion to have. In any case, what is made abundantly clear from this information is that Facebook and others like them neither will or can protect the public interest.
I like the argument that we have freedom of choice but we by no means have freedom of chance. To me that would be a place to start in terms of finding regulation that can protect the public.
It's an unfortunate but inevitable outcome of the attention economys race to the bottom. This area needs better regulation. The best approach is to stay out of technical implementation and focus on what principles companies should adhere to. As James Williams argue: it should be a civil right to have "freedom of chance". We already knew all too well what it does to our democracy that a large part of the public only gets their news from Facebook. Prefiltered by the monetizing interests that drives it. In such an environment there is no fair chance of deciding for one self - at one end it's one individual on a smartphone, but the other is the entire R&D of Facebook with just the one goal of keeping your focus, making you engage.
I don't think it has left the station per se. I agree we should get as driving battery EV as possible, but at some point the current grid will not sustain more charging stations at the mall through existing cabling. At that point it makes sense to look to hydrogen. It should be possible to drive it to existing gas stations for refueling, reusing existing infrastructure on that front.
In Denmark we could split water through hydrolyse whenever there is over-production from windmills. This over-production is something that we currently pay our neighbours to receive. In addition the heat produced can be used as district heating, making it less of an issue that it is less efficient to produce hydrogen.