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📣 🚨 🪩 I'm delighted to announce "Funding The Web: a covenant for browsers, search, and people", new work from yours truly generously supported by D//F: ftw.fund. It's a complicated topic but it only impacts the whole web, so please bear with me a little! 🧵

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.

The levy system may not have been *initially* intended as a cartel, but today it's maintained with full knowledge that it is monopolistic. The US courts have said so unambiguously. That's just one of the problems the systems causes — the report documents several more. So what should we do about it?

I offer a range of solutions from which to pick, but for this thread I will just mention one, the Web Infrastructure Search Endowment (WISE). The idea is simple: don't eliminate the levy system — it's there, it funds browsers — but replace its governance so that it works much better, for all of us.

Has anyone figured out how to operate and govern complex, critical, transnational digital infrastructure? Yes! The dangerous radicals from [*checks notes*] the finance industry solved that problem… 50 years ago. SWIFT is a coop of 10,000 banks that does exactly that — and there are other examples.