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Internet champion implies Web champion, but not vice versa. What you're really asking for is some Internet champions - EFF, FSF(E), TOR.

The obvious difficulty is there's little money in it, as the benefits are distributed throughout society rather than captured by a centralized company. My overall point is that looking towards the tech giants to defend our own rights is folly.

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I see the confusion here: "champion" in this context is an economic term meaning a leading company that's the pride of it's home nation.

No, that's the way I took it. The fact of the matter is that Google isn't primarily an Internet company, but a media company that happens to deliver over the Internet. Would you call Time Magazine a "Postal Company" ?

(They do interface with several early Internet protocols such as SMTP. But that's better looked at as mining content from non-web protocols, which they'd have no intrinsic problem deprecating like XMPP)

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