89,004 local governments existed in the United States in 2012. By extension, there are a shit-ton of public sector websites including schools and libraries. So why can’t there be a public-funded search engine just for indexing all the public service websites?
Citizens who need to access a public service should not have to visit some shitty Google-like search engine by a surveillance advertiser to find a public resource. Google and Microsoft should not be gateways to public access. They can offer their shitty service for private sector searches but governments should have sovereignty from that. If I have to ask tech giants what is the URL for my secretary of state, it’s a fucked up dependency.
It also shouldn’t just be a search engine. There should also be a hierarchical structured directory. A public service directory plus search engine would be inherently ad-free and tracker free, federally funded.
Progress needed.
That’s a hell of a lot better than business people, who use their knowledge of people to exploit them. One great example of this is campaigning to become POTUS right now.
We need leaders who understand technology and who are keen to have technology benefit people rather than exploit them. IOW, a Congress with engineers from the FOSS community would greatly benefit the country (obviously not an engineer who understands people well which they use against people; e.g. people like Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Matthew Prince).