That's because the library is funded by taxpayers – it doesn't need the money.

How would you feel about a government-sponsored search engine? I think China has one of those.

If the queries were totally anonymized to protect it from the government itself, and the information provided was thorough and unbiased, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.

If it were done the way China does it, I would.

A service offered by the government is really only as trustworthy as the government that's offering it. Do you have a problem with Xinhua News Agency? What about PBS or the BBC?

How would you feel about a for-profit Wikipedia?

> Today's features article: McDonalds!

Quite frankly, it might not be the worst solution. Britain has a government-sponsored TV station which is generally pretty well-regarded, for example...

Government-sponsored is totally different than government-led. China has the latter in terms of their search engine.

Indeed -- but the grandparent talked about "government-sponsored."

So we'll all be happy to do our searches through NSA.gov? Or would you prefer the alternative, google.nsa.gov?

We can even make searches like FOIA requests, where if you search something they don't like, they redact the results you wanted, and if you don't phrase the search correctly, they just give you nothing.

The BBC is sponsored by a licence fee collected from British people, whether they want to pay for the BBC or not.

Similarly, if the government pays for a search engine, they'll be paying with taxes taken from us anyway.

Yeah, so?

So what's better about paying via taxes instead of paying directly?

When something is paid for directly (and consequentially cannot be afforded by some), it will be biased towards the opinions of its backers, and thus, the wealthy.

And when it's paid for by the government, it will be biased towards the opinions of government officials, their backers, and thus, the wealthy (or the influential, in a political system where money has less influence than in the US).