They pay them for making Google the default search engine, and it is hypothesized that the payment may also influence them to not provide ad-blocking by default and possibly other things that are not beneficial for Google's business.
By whom and on what basis? Those are non-optional questions that should have strong answers as preconditions to you posting about it, if the objective is to offer something more than simple bullshitting (in the Harvey Frankfurt sense of indifference to truth).
This also doesn't answer like 90% of my concerns from my previous comments. Who has ever intentionally had a software development approach of having one team develop features and another person revert those features, working in tandem? And why would they need donations that are 0.20% of what they already get in revenue to finance it? I feel like you're just improv riffing here.
