In speaking with an old friend of mine who is a hard-core libertarian, he told me that he generally prefers the free market over anything else, he does prefer the government run things when a monopoly is inevitable. The reason being, a democratic government is at least in theory still somewhat accountable to the general public while a privately-held monopoly is not.

I think that's similar to the feelings you're expressing: centralization isn't great, but if we have centralization anyways, let's use the government. The big question in this case being how centralized do we think things might end up in practice.