Funding The Web: From Cartel to Covenant
Browsers are critical public infrastructure that no one pays for. The search/browser levy that funds them has become a de facto private government of the web; this report documents it, analyses its harms, and lays out a toolbox to place it under public-interest governance.
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Browsers, and the browser engines that power them, provide critical public infrastructure to over five billion people and yet no one pays for their browser. To cover the high cost of maintaining such highly complex products, browser vendors and search engine providers have developed a system in which money is levied from search revenue and distributed to browsers.
Over the years, this ad hoc system has succeeded in providing funding to browsers but it forms a de facto private government of essential web functions in ways that produce detrimental effects on the digital sphere in general: lack of transparency, poor funding of browser engines, defunding of other parts of the web, massive market concentration, plummeting search quality, harms to privacy, lower cost for effective disinformation, reduced revenue for quality journalism, and loss of opinion pluralism.
This report documents the existing system, analyses its negative externalities so as to determine requirements for alternatives, and proposes multiple paths forward along with enforcement and governance considerations. The objective is not to break or replace this system, but to place it gradually under the kind of governance that can make it operate in the public interest.
The report has its own site at ftw.fund, where it can also be read online. It was funded by the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund.
Authors: Robin Berjon