[pmoriarty]

"You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this"

Or the US government, which funds the overwhelming majority of basic research in the world.

[SquishyPanda23]

There's a sense in which both systems tax ordinary folk to pay for science.

In the Bell Labs system, the tax is the monopoly price paid by folks on their phone bill. In the other system the taxes are collected by the government.

There's a lot of money to be made migrating such taxes to the private sector where private individuals can take a cut.

This is one of the reasons it's often profitable to campaign against things like the public funding of science (e.g. the recent attacks on the NSF).

[Brakenshire]

Seems a stretch, what about all the other national research bodies?

[option]

I’d say we need both.