I'm surprised that it was USA's responsibility to fund this in the first place. Why weren't other countries providing funds?
The US isn't supporting it out of charity, it's good for US businesses to have someone coordinating this for everyone. Why would we want to rely on other countries to be supporting our tech sector? At least now we are subject to only the capricious whims of our own government, as little comfort as that is right now (if another country was funding it we would be relying on the whims of a foreign government, which isn't ideal when tech is the golden goose of your modern economy).
The funding requirements can't be that high and I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.
Up until recently CVE was very centralized and only in the last few years have there been steps in more decentralization with CNAs taking more responsibility, Red Hat as a CNA of last-resort etc. So, the cost of doing all of this work has already been shifted partially (!) away from the US but I have not seen any movement towards e.g. moving the program to a foundation which could have been done.
Personally I would conclude that it was the responsibility of the US to pay for this because they wanted to and it was in their best interest to control this program.
In my opinion it's mostly the industry needing to adapt to a new setup that needs to happen. It was just "easy" to rely on what's already there. A lot of company policies need to be adapted etc.
And perhaps if there had been more than a days notice, some consortium could be pulled together, but who's going to pay? Why would private companies do this, how do they profit? CVE program was the roads that everybody could drive on.
The basic lack of understanding of how the world works is killing the US. Why do people think we have such a massive GDP? Where do people think that comes from? We've given control of everything in society over to our dumbest and greediest members that have no clue about how anything works.
> I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.
The EU. They can have all the massive advantages that funding MITRE will give them. Why won't they step up to the plate? It's killing the EU and they have absolutely no idea how anything works. It's why they're a dying empire.
So, since the US government needed that (it provides security to US businesses), they organised and funded it (as everything else, with US taxpayers money, and savings from investors in US and abroad.)
Now, the US government decided to commit temporary-seppuku, so a number of things will happen:
* state-level government will use their local-taxpayer money to fund similar efforts (with duplication of effort), or share it with everyone
* another country or block of country will do it, and decide whether they want to "share". (I suppose Russia and China have more of an incentive to keep their CVE DB private, given their level of dis-integration with US economy ? EU maybe ?)
* an international, ad-hoc organisation is created to share the funding (something like NATO.) Multi-latteralism is not exactly in fashion this days, but if EU does it, it will be "international" by design since we're not really a federation ; so, states in "Southern Canada" are welcome to join.
* or none of that happens, the CVE db rots for a while, until a sufficiently embarrassing cybersecurity problem occurs, and the CVE db is deemed worthy of the "10% you need to bring back" by President Elon.
Pray your company, families and friends are never on the wrong side of the "reverse-Chersteron's fence".
Other countries have their own programs, some cooperating with the US, others separate. China has the CNNVD if you're interested in helping Chinese society safe. My government operates https://advisories.ncsc.nl/advisories to serve my country's interests.
Of course, the US is free to abandon their programme and rely on Chinese, Russian, and European vulnerability databases to keep their country safe. It does save them a couple of million after all!
Now of course USA is ceasing (voluntarily, by stripping down every international soft power effector in government) to be a superpower, to the great glee of dictators all around the world.
The "we can't afford being great" is a direct admission that USA is no longer a superpower. And is not going to become great again, just another nation again (at whims of China).
It was to the advantage of the US and allies to coordinate and lead in tracking and fixing such errors.
Multiple countries, companies, and individuals contributed finding and fixing bugs.
The administrative task of keeping track was one part of a greater picture, a part that came with first to be advised and other perks.
It's not that the US had a responsibility to take on the lead admin task, more that in past times the US saw an advantage to being at the centre of global action.
This is just another part of increasing US isolationism.
From what I understand of the article, none of these allies were funding it.
> Multiple countries, companies, and individuals contributed finding and fixing bugs.
Clearly that itself isn't enough. Someone has to pay for maintaining this service. It appears that no one other than USA spent money in funding it.
Why would it be shut down without asking for others to fund it, if it's some sort of burden on the US?
Programs like this pay for themselves many times over. There are only two reasons for cutting this: absolute idiocy, or active sabotage of the US.
Researchers also don't directly talk with MITRE they go through one of the intermediaries that assigns the number.