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Damn, these are a lot of words! Congrats that had to be a few metric tons of work

Thanks, yeah, it's a lot of words. Words words words wooooooords. I can barely tell if any of it makes sense anymore 😂

Can you make the links in the references... real links?

Browsers (and mobile OSs) are complex and expensive, yet we universally get them free. This is because they are funded by a levy on search engines. The amount of funding is huge: Apple for instance gets over $20bn/year. (And no, they don't spend that money on making a browser.)

If we just got free browsers that would be fine, but the levy system is privately governed and has severe consequences. It maintains an artificial monopoly: the biggest search engine can pay more → more traffic → more money → can pay more. It's the forever Google experience.

Much worse: this system defunds the whole of the web, and notably the media. Thanks to its monopoly, Google charges *far* higher prices for ads than it normally could and gets a much higher share of web marketing channels than it should. That's money, in the tens of billions, not flowing to the web.