The index itself is already separate in a sense that nobody is being stopped to do the indexing task themselves.
Google is a private for-profit company so we cannot realistically expect them to provide something for free to the public without generating profits in return.
The web index is not a locked up proprietary resource by anyone, so people can do the indexing themselves but the real question is how do you fund a service that will keep increasing its workload exponentially and indefinitely? What institution will have the required resources to bare such costs?
Google is a private for-profit company so we cannot realistically expect them to provide something for free to the public without generating profits in return.
The web index is not a locked up proprietary resource by anyone, so people can do the indexing themselves but the real question is how do you fund a service that will keep increasing its workload exponentially and indefinitely? What institution will have the required resources to bare such costs?