MDN Plus

Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this?

In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.

If W3C or WHATWG try to "tax" Google, Apple, or Microsoft to participate, they will lose all significance the next day as big tech starts their own exclusive group to define web standards. They completely control all influential browsers. Whoever makes the implementations gets to choose the standards.

Unlike governments, standards committees have zero enforcement power.

So put the governments in charge of the standards committees.

I would personally never advocate for that, but it’s a potential solution.

Putting the government in charge of anything is almost never the right way forward IMHO