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Comment by _ink_ | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the EU should step in. Having a browser that is not controlled by big tech should be part of an effort to reduce the dependency on the US.

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How about not involving governments in how Firefox is run. Especially not those keen on backdoors and "Chat control".

It could be a stand alone association ruled by its members or a classic free-for-all whatever goes code talks FOSS project.

If they can invest some money with no strings attached – hey, why not.

The funding is the string simply because it can be taken away.

> funding is the string simply because it can be taken away

Endow a working group under Fraunhofer [1]. Their product is simply and solely a browser engine. Nothing more.

[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/en.html

Have you asked the people who pay in the end (the taxpayer) if they want that? The very last thing I want my taxes to go to is anything that has "no strings attached". Its by definition a gift and gifting taxes should be a crime.

I wholeheartedly agree, though how to utilize the tax money isn’t the problematic part in the taxation IMO.

if its come with string attached then another agency (ehm ehm intelligence) would try to get their hands on them

Agencies seem to get involved even in private "independant" companies. It has nothing to do with the official string attachments.

Then taxes could be used to pay government employees whose job is to contribute on a specific project. That could apply to Linux, a browser, maybe AOSP. Sure it'd require funding, but spent on employees within said countries you get it back and it does give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision, both positive and negative.

Whether the people are employed by the government directly or a different entity isn't relevant at all, the relevant part is taxes being used for something that has an undefined benefit for the people who are forced to pay for it. (And in case of "no string attacked" even has an undefined goal.)

>give Europe as a whole the ability to contribute its vision

Who's vision? The peoples vision? Or the vision of bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists etc.

In the US, at least, all funding goes through Congress, so get in your rep's ear if you don't like this (or get in their ear if you do)

A gaggle of governments with conflicting interests are less fearful than some private individuals with simple goals - like getting rich.

Currently private companies rule the browser world and they wield incredible power over everything from standards to PKI. Their interest is a world that depends on them even more.

They seem united on censoring free speech and removing all privacy.

The non-gov approach has been the last decades. I don't find the result convincing to be honest.

The path you're proposing has been pushed by the community for about how long the Mozilla foundation existed. I'm not sure asking them one more time will make a big difference.

They don't have to tell them how to run it. But it would be for the benefit of everyone if they could give grants to Mozilla to help them wean off of Google

Mozilla has been less and less dependent on Google and is now working on a VPN, MDN Plus, and other revenue streams that are also helping it become more independent. But the truth is that if all Google money suddenly stopped today, there would be no more Mozilla

The problem is that the people in power to remove the funding are the same people who are pushing for chat control and removal of encryption. Even if say the terms says that the funding is just a sponsorship, it would encourage few government folks to look out for more knowing the company would die if they stop funding.

As a European citizen, why would I want my taxes to fund a browser built by a US entity and still subject to the whims of the current US administration?

Unless you mean that Mozilla should move completely to Europe, sure. But the part about the EU not telling Mozilla what to do is naive. If my taxes pay for it, of course I want the EU to tell Mozilla what to do.

State involvement tends to come with strings attached. The EU would insist on the browser to implement mechanisms to 'limit the spread of mis-, dis- and malinformation' where it is up to the whims of the politicos in Brussels to decide what the populace is allowed to see and what is to be suppressed. To that I say a loud and clear 'thanks but no thanks', I prefer my technology to work for me instead of it being an enforcement mechanism for the powers that be.

Possibly but right now you're being guided to whatever information makes the most ad revenue. A choice of two compromised mechanisms might be better than none.

No, that is not the issue here - this is not about which sites I frequent but about whether the browser I use to do so tries to keep me from going there. The content of those sites can be influenced by advertising (which I rigorously block, no exceptions) but the browser as of yet does not attempt to keep me from visiting site A nor does it change its contents (other than by means of the content blocker which I have control over) to match some ideological goal. An EU-financed browser could end up doing these things which is why I do not want the EU to get involved in this way.

It could but a national government is more likely to block sites at the ISP level.

Also ... private companies can block things they don't like, such as competitors...or alter their search rankings.

Currently Firefox does not do any of those things out of the .deb/.tar.gz. I'd like to keep it that way, hence my resistance against involvement by parties which have shown to be either susceptible to or directly calling for censorship. This is also one of the many reasons why I wanted to see Mitchell Baker disappear from the organisation as she clearly was calling for active censorship.

I frankly do not understand all the resistance against a call for a politically neutral tech infrastructure. To all those people frantically pressing that down-vote button, do you really desire for your tech infrastructure to be ideologically driven? Do you even understand what such a thing means and what it will lead to?

Governments are not necessarily all about politics - the electricity system isn't and the road network isn't.

Private organisations that have great power over important bits of the internet are also not necessarily politically neutral and there is no level to control them.

In California they were shutting the water off from houses where people had parties during lockdowns. Governments absolutely will abuse their powers and should never be trusted.

The EU could step in for the browser, that bit of common, required infrastructure needed to provide modern government services. If that was the task given, EU bureaucrats could be the best choice for managing it. Any attempt to step beyond that immediately fails at the planning stage, because conflating the infrastructure component with anything else creates a ball of mud and a political and technical black hole. Like your example, where the EU couldn't even consider it because member states haven't given the organization that particular power.

There's already an independent Europe based browser...

Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is just a chromium wrapper as far as I understand.

It's Chromium with the Google bits ripped out, Vivaldi has their own sign in/sync functionality, built in ad blocker, and custom UI. It's based on Chromium but has quite a bit different going on, as much as Brave or Edge.

But unlike Brave and Edge, Vivaldi isn't open-source.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser...

They basically just want to keep the copyright to their UI. You can see the source but they don't want anyone to rip off their UI.

And let's be real, every browser (even Firefox) has closed source server side code.

Also, the comment I initially responded to was about why isn't there a European browser not controlled by "big tech"... Vivaldi is an independent company in Europe making a browser.

> And let's be real, every browser (even Firefox) has closed source server side code.

What is Firefox's? Accounts and Sync are both open source, and I'm struggling to think of anything else

i.e. https://github.com/mozilla/fxa

But it depends on the Blink engine.

So? Blink is a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KDE's web engine. It's all open source anyway. The point isn't that the code must be unique, only that it's not dependent on a large US tech firm. They might benefit from Chromium development but the option to hard fork is always there.

Blink is a Google project, primarily maintained by Google employees.

or to invest in Servo

Not sure if you're aware but servo is currently funded by the linux foundation Europe. Not quite tax money, but European capital.

The EU invests in Servo already, for example through NLNet grants.

A dysfunctional company is not going to benefit from the addition of a dysfunctional political layer

Ah yes, the same EU that forced Apple to disable encryption. Perfect

That's UK.

What happened to HN that people are arguing for more government regulations?

As if centralization with one big company weren't enough, now we're not even satisfied with one country, but a block of them. Yikes.

Nope, run in the opposite direction. Unsuck from any teat.

a block of countries is what makes them far less worrisome. They're too busy competing with each other - none is going to want the others spying on it's own citizens for gain.

Is that the same as a republic of independent states?

As long as the EU doesn't have the equivalent of the Commerce Clause then, sure.

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