> even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge So you se

> even a nominal fee of a few dollars a month would preclude most of the third world from accessing the best index of humanity's collective knowledge So you seem to be referring to Google (annual revenue ~$250 billion.) But Wikipedia (annual revenue $160 million) also qualifies. Also The Library of Congress (annual budget $800 million.) Another interesting data point is the USPS $77 billion annual revenue. So there are definitely proven business models that provide services basically at-cost and without all the negative externalities. And Wikipedia's budget is so small that even relatively poor countries could fund it with less than 1/5th of their education budget. (e.g. Uganda's education budget in 2020 was roughly $700 million.) And that would let them pay globally competitive salaries to hire software engineers to build indexes that are actually optimized first and foremost for knowledge that's focused on their culture rather than the US.