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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.

Browser vendors benefit from this system: they get a direct cut of Google's inflated prices that they wouldn't get if the money flowed in advertising to other, more innovative sites. Understand this: Google, Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, Opera, etc. all make money defunding 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.

The browser/search world has specific requirements that make WISE different from SWIFT, but what SWIFT gives us is proof of feasibility for the kind of governance we need. But browsers benefit from cooperating to maintain Google's monopoly — why would they change?

13/5/26, 4:33 pm0 reposts6 likes

That's where the Digital Markets Act comes in. The DMA governs, amongst many other things, choice screens to decide the default search engine and browser. As currently applied, it's very underwhelming. (I've been in Europe 2 years, have never seen a choice screen.) But it has potential.

The Commission has half as many people working on DMA enforcement as the city of Brussels has enforcing parking violations. That can *never* work. Instead, as is commonly done elsewhere, the Commission should delegate the choice screen system to a standards-setting process.

On its own, that could already create huge improvement: competitive markets in search and browsers! (I provide a basic demo.) But choice screens also need eligibility criteria — and participation in WISE could be one. We have a path to enforcement that doesn't implicate the Commission politically.