Comment by gortok

If you don't want this to happen, then a company would need to:

1. Have the capital to build and maintain a browser 2. By selling copies of that browser 3. In sufficient funds to keep the business going and make the owners a profit.

Let's say you can do it with a small team -- if you're forking something like firefox, and pay for the salary of 21 people -- full time, 8 developers, a PM, a manager, Customer support (3 people), 3 sales folks, and 3 testers, and one owner.

If the average salary is $175,000, and the fully loaded cost of each employee (including office space, equipment, benefits) is $250,000, then just to break even -- and not even account for inflation or costs rising -- and not even accounting for capital expenditures, the product would have to sell 105,000 copies at $50 a pop.

If you sold it for $30 a year, that's now 175,000 copies, every year. Realistically, to account for taxes and the fact that Developer salaries are no longer expensible (thanks Trump!), you'd have to sell around twice that number of copies, so around 350,000 copies of this browser, a year. Every year. Just to break even.

When's the last time 350,000 people said, "I want to buy a web browser?". When's the last time 350,000 people bought a web browser?

We've made our own bed in this one, the second folks saw that Internet Explorer was free; and that killed the original Mozilla browser -- that -- by the way -- I happily paid for.

If you want an internet where you're not the product, then that's an internet where the business models have to change, and the customer desire to pay for the software they use has to go up.

And that still -- still -- does not alleviate the problem of capital needing to get started, which is only exacerbated by the Section 174 changes in the TCJA of 2017.