Comment by fauigerzigerk

Governments are unreliable (e.g. USAID or recently disappeared government datasets) and have even more conflicts of interest than Google itself (e.g. debates around encryption). Many people don't trust their government.

Commercial funding is not necessarily more reliable in general. Google keeps shutting down stuff all the time. But in this particular case, the commercial interest is so strong that funding is secure.

In my opinion, governments should focus on natural monopolies (taxation, violence, justice, transport infrastructure, water, etc) and on areas where there is broad consensus for a public option (health, schools, etc).

Where governments fund random stuff that few people understand the importance of, there is a big risk of the whole thing getting DOGEd or starved to stagnation. The government would never put up a fight against Apple relegating the web platform to the status of a glorified document viewer.

In my opinion, the status quo is flawed but the alternatives are worse.

If the court decides that Google must "divest" Chrome, they will have to say what that means for an open source project. If it basically comes down to Google being banned from controlling the default search engine setting in any web browser, then their main incentive for funding Chrome would be gone.

If that happens, the only solution I see is a joint "Chrome Foundation" effort funded by a number of corporations with a less direct interest in the viability of the web, i.e the Linux model. But this would be very disruptive. I fear that browser development would be aimless and start to stagnate. Other oligopolists would quickly take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum.