That's OK :) Better walls of text than not!

What I mean by prosecution is that if a research body signs a contract with a scientist to do research, then those contracts would need to specify what research actually is, and that is the first step towards penalizing people who aren't really doing it. Indeed the process of flushing more research into the private sector would automatically eliminate a lot of the grey-area fraud that is so prevalent, because it would force a lot more people to write down what precisely they mean by "doing research", as well as continually evaluate that definition via normal management techniques. For example, is a simple modelling exercise "research"? It's often treated as such by e.g. banks, but the big tech labs we're talking about don't engage in a much of that, unless you count AI, but I think that's sufficiently beyond the sort of modelling you find in most science that it's best to treat it separately.

At the moment governments fund science but have no working definition of what science is, which breeds a lot of cynicism of the type I display above w.r.t. sociology. Is gender studies "science"? Most people would say no, but the government says yes. A more subtle example is epidemiology. A close examination of their papers will reveal that it's just plugging public CSV files into a bunch of very over-simplified simulations, and publishing the outputs. Is that science? If it is, can I get paid to play Cities: Skylines all day as long as I write a paper at the end? It sounds like a stupid suggestion but actually yes I can:

https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/2/118

In my view this type of thing is not science, but my guess is at this point the science-y ness of epidemiology or urban planning would split 50/50 or most people would just go with the government's definition of "they receive grants and call themselves scientists, therefore they're scientists".

Would Google exist without the NSF? The specific company maybe not, but there were plenty of search engines around before Google, and Page in particular was already keen on creating a tech company when he was very young so would likely have ended up a startup founder sooner or later. An example competitor was Inktomi, which had already started doing pay-per-click ads. It's all forgotten now but Google nearly didn't survive its early years because they got sued over 'stealing' the PPC ad concept. They were able to argue that their own elaborations on the idea were sufficiently different that it wasn't infringement. It's very plausible that one of these other firms would have struck upon the idea of PageRank; they were certainly incentivized to do so especially once Inktomi had realised that PPC ads were a way to monetize search engines.

"The Deepmind arcade paper and essentially the entire deep reinforcement learning field today is based on decades-old research funded by the UK government. What if that research was locked away in a UK corporation? Would Deepmind even exist?"

Well DeepMind is a difficult example to debate here for both of us because of course DeepMind is or was a UK corporation and they do the exact opposite of locking up their research, if anything they're famously publicity and paper hungry. Google/DeepMind are actually a strong counterpoint to the idea we need academia for long range research: DeepMind is nothing but long range research (of unclear utility!) and of course self driving cars have been driven by Google for the last decade, pun totally intended.

If I were arguing in your shoes I'd be trying to argue Google is the exception that proves the rule and/or trying to distract attention from it, because it shows that companies can and will do long range research. Microsoft Research is another example, although it's less "pure" because it's more or less a little recreation of academia inside of Microsoft. I prefer the Google approach where science and technology are fully integrated.

Now the wider issue of governments needing to fund long range research is one I used to fully agree with. It sounds right and it's easy to find examples where you can sort of link them to government funded research. But as you can see, I changed my mind over time and no longer find myself in that camp, because:

1. Government funded basic research isn't free. We have to weigh up costs and benefits. How much of a contribution does government grant money make to the technological successes we take for granted today? For examples like PageRank, self-driving or DeepMind the initial contribution was quite small and mostly in the form of logistics (grand challenges) or theory work (which is cheap). And how much of a cost does it impose?

2. The costs are not just financial. I guess this is what mostly changed my mind. I concluded a big part of the "cost" of government funded research is actually in terms of intellectual pollution of the literature. If you have to wade through 50 useless, deceptive or outright fraudulent papers to find 1 good one because governments aren't paying attention to what they fund, then that poses an externalized cost on everyone who wants to benefit from research. Moreover this work has to be endlessly duplicated because journals are loathe to retract anything, so everyone who wants to push technology forward in a certain area has to do this work within their own small group because there's no coordination mechanism ... or just give up and ignore the literature entirely (this is what eventually happened to me).

I think a stronger argument for government funded research than the "it would never have happened" approach is that government funded science is usually un-patented and freely accessible. But even this argument is kind of weak because universities do patent the results of tax funded science, maybe not in computer science but it happens a lot in other fields, and also because the results of the research are often behind paywalls too! Although that's been getting better with time and is usually not a problem in CS (which IMHO is definitely one of the better fields).

But overall, to me it's just not clear that the benefits of buying papers en-masse outweighs the costs, both in dollar terms, time terms and of course, the inevitable costs when people put bogus research into production and things go wrong.