Browsers are infrastructure. I wonder if their development should be financed like other infrastructure projects. Though I don't really know what I am talking about. Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?
> Who pays for telecommunication cables on the ocean floor?
TIL, it's a mix of private venture and public money [1], depending on which cables we're talking about. The ownership of those cables is also interesting [2] (granted, the source is a bit dated, but I can imagine that's still a trend):
> The leaders of today’s boom are two of the biggest generators of data traffic: Google and Facebook. Internet companies are behind about four-fifths of transatlantic cable investment planned for 2018-20, up from less than 20 percent in the three years through 2017, according to TeleGeography. Google has become “by far the biggest investor” in submarine cables, even taking full ownership of two of them—a reflection of the vast amounts of data the company transmits, says Mike Conradi, a lawyer at DLA Piper in London who’s been working on undersea fiber deals since 1999. Content companies “can make or break these cables.”
