Look, the goverment is good at providing a good starter set of things you need for life. Infrastructure has no real competition so the infrastructure needs to be state owned since we can’t have it fail. I would look favorably if the government funded an open initiative to build a FOSS search index… but I think a search engine isn’t something like core infrastructure that can only reasonably exist once.

Besides… SearxNG is just a relay engine and if every european used it and relayed the search request to other search engines without them getting a dime I don’t think that would be fair.

Lemmy also isn’t developed by the state. It might get funding from the goverment but thats a very different thing - Core research that doesn’t have a straight up ROI is also one of the things where everyone benefits of it long term falls under something the government should do. I just don’t think the government is good at running an economical business and I can’t imagine living in a country where every company was like state-run with a top-down system. Competition is good, what we have is a lack of competition