I agree with your policy position. The three options should be:
- Crowd-funded, free to use, privacy preserving
- Paid, privacy preserving
- Self-hosted
A fourth “free to use, subsidized through data collection” option shouldn’t even be legal.
But we’re not there yet. And in order to get there, we need companies like Kagi to populate the second category so that when politicians say “but how will they make money if they can’t sell data?” we have examples to point to.