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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.

13/5/26, 4:33 pm0 reposts5 likes

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?