No, it's not government funded. It's funded by the people from a yearly licence fee, so has no ads. This is how it stays politically impartial too (mostly).

More like life bans or deactivation of new mandatory accounts (for data collection) if you don't stick it on straight.

I thought he tried by placing some nutter in charge of the postal service?

I've got mine (in the UK) and really enjoyed the ARG even if I didn't manage to solve much of the crypto stuff. It was a team effort and I hope they do some more, maybe for LNF. I think they hired a third party company to do ARG as it must be a hell of a lot of work to create and manage.

I haven't tried to set up music yet, but getting a lot of false lookups on tv episodes even after renaming to the generally agreed file naming format. Still playing with the setup so may get better. Linked it to my kodi on rpi4.