Post "Good Google," Who Will Defend the Open Web? 133
psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have both the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"
Re:USA was making a surplus (Score:2, Informative)
USA was making a surplus in the closing years of the Clinton government.
Clinton never pulled the nation out of debt. What you refer to as a surplus just means that the government pulled in more revenue than it spent for the year--NOT that there was no national debt. The national debt increased by $2 T over Clinton's administration, overall.
Re:There's only one company on that list... (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla has plenty of clout.
Post-Opera Mozilla controls one of the three important Web engines. Any Web standard needs to be implemented by at least two engines to become a recommendation. That gives us a powerful say in what gets standardized.
We have enough Firefox users that things we do in Firefox have a real impact on the Web. For example, we introduced Do Not Track. We think Google's Native Client isn't good for the Web so we've introduced asm.js instead which is rapidly getting traction. Webkit's original CSS gradients sucked so we introduced a better alternative that is now standardized. We don't like encumbered codecs on the Web so we pushed the creation of the royalty-free Opus audio codec which is getting a lot of traction. Etc.
Having said that, we don't have infinite clout and we sometimes lose battles and have to make compromises. But then, so do our much bigger competitors.