Comment Public Search Engine vs. Competition (Score 2) 378
In the beginning, we had a variety of search engines out there. It wasn't necessarily obvious at the time that a company like google would get a near monopoly.
I think the meta question here:
what are the range of services that really ought to be public vs. private/corporate?
The net simply would not exist if it hadn't been for DoD participation. I think we are still missing basic pieces of infrastructure. Some of these simply will not exist without public input.
My sense is that 99% of the time, google works fine-but that 1% of the time it doesn't work is critical.I think clearly identifying that 1% is a good idea and a site that could do that well might be important in its own right.