Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My take:

- The Mozilla Foundation should be publicly funded, with Firefox being considered a reference implementation for all web standards; Google should be considered a "gatekeeper", and fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C. Perhaps the W3C should be regulated as well.

- Efforts like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive should be considered public libraries, and publicly funded.

- Privately-owned platforms with vast libraries of knowledge - like Youtube - should be required to allow easy and on-demand export to the Internet Archive (subject to the copyright owner's chosen license).

The question is, who is the "public" in "publicly funded". The EU and the US could cover the majority, but considering that the entire world's population is reliant on those products/services, perhaps that's a matter worth raising with the UN.

Am I exaggerating here? Heck no, livelihoods of billions of people depend on these things. It takes one of the "top 5" corps to pull the rug and cause worldwide chaos.

Whole lotta "shoulds" there.

Who is the worldwide authority that has the power to declare Firefox a web standard?

Google being "fined for introducing de facto "standards" into mainline Chrome without going thru the W3C" is... wow, a leap of legal imagination. That is not how anything works.

None of this is realistic. We need attainable goals, using concrete steps. Getting Google declared a monopoly: one step. Keeping that ruling intact through the following years: another step (Hello, Microsoft in the 1990's). Establish web standards, beyond the current skeletal concepts: a BIG step.

> None of this is realistic. We need attainable goals, using concrete steps.

Well you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.[0]

Surely it makes sense to have overarching goals, that you can then divide up into little concrete stepping stones.

Whether or not your big goal is possible or worthwhile is something you can keep examining along the way.

Incremental change is the only kind that you can make happen, but without big-picture direction you'll just skitter around local maxima.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z-xI1384Ry4

I didn't say it should happen overnight, or that this should be the final state of affairs.

It isn't about politics, or even corporations simply having control over our daily lives. At some point, it has to be recognised as a necessity, not just for the sake of our culture and legacy, but for our survival as a species. There's no other piece of digital infrastructure as important as the web, and there's hardly anything we do nowadays that doesn't depend on something digital.

I’ve said the same things elsewhere (see my profile), but we need to differentiate between centralized publicly-funded and decentralized publicly-funded approaches.

A lot of libertarian types’ arguments against publicly-funded infrastructure is mostly against that public funding being centralized.

I don’t think Mozilla becoming publicly funded, with money taken in from the EU, US, Russia, India, and China, would end up being good for users.

However, I do think that each of these entities having their own branch of Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever, with their own teams focusing on their users’ needs, contributing upstream, with a small team to handle the “mainline” version, would be pretty ideal.

The same should probably also be happening for at least one Chrome/Webkit browser, too (though, the mega-corps do seem to have its support system much more reinforced).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com