I wonder if something like a NIH style grant system would make sense to keep opensource software funded and supported without needing corporate support. I have xz on the mind. Would that have fallen under the control of a bad actor if the original maintainer (or others) had the financial ability to dedicate their time to it's maintenance? Who knows.
Many countries have their own tech stack for what Google provides (think Japan, Korea, China, Russia). It's a shame how EU has completely given up its market for Google.
Reddit, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, are all locked down or heavily restricted. I am sure there is still a burgeoning small web, but it is increasingly hard to find. Would many consumers notice/care if your search engine only surfaced pages from the top 1000 highest ranked domains? You would actually decrease the amount of SEO garbage you hit from Stackoverflow clones, Amazon listicles, or Grandma's cookie recipe #9381.
A bigger issue are the network effects - no website can afford to block Google; not so much for your startup search engine.
Lots of boutique stores in the city centre moved into the newly created mall (due to the economics of malls being as they are)- the mall was also centrally located so: nothing lost.
Almost immediately after this happened; another mall was built outside of town (requiring a car to get to), but as you might expect: rents were substantially cheaper.
All those stores (via peer pressure, cost saving and so forth) moved into the new mall.
Those boutiques never returned and the high-street is dead.
— we have this same situation in tech,
We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world), and, at some point that will have to end, but the oxygen has already left the room for anything else to exist - everything else is starved.
And, Microsoft will not save us, they are leaning into these practices and will suffer the same if US tech is regulated (as it should be). There’s no space for competition.