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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.




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