It made a lot of really good choices in the late 90s when a lot of dot-com companies started and a lot of people around the world started getting interested in making their own websites. It eventually snowballed to the LAMP stack which became the most user friendly way of doing stuff on the web on low budget. The inertia from this is massive so it's staying for a bunch more years.
> A lot of people treat economics as though damage didn't happen unless someone acknowledges it.
This is what I call the TV effect. People are trained from an early age, by consuming media, to only construct what is "real" by what is announced. And it's not just economics, but all sorts of aspects of life.
Another addition I'd like to add here is more often then not wrong people get booted while the "dead weight" tends to stick around and becomes even deader due to a motivation fall from the layoff. So maybe it doesn't kill, but for sure exacerbates an already bad situation.
> you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build.
As opposed to CERN being easy to build!? I'd say is totally doable, but it doesn't promise filling anyone's pockets at the moment so traction is hard. Who knows, maybe in the future..