accountable to no one

There's a good lesson here for any who wants to be a founder and start their own company - the maintainers of the timezone DB are accountable to their users, just as any founder is accountable to their customers.

If the timezone DB maintainers start messing around with the way it works, they will quickly find that people start alternatives, which would be worse for everyone. Governments would choose to own them, and the bad things other posters have talked about would happen. Particularly bad governments would pass laws that mandate the IT systems in that country would have to use their timezone data. That would be yet another way a country can exert control. The only reason they don't do it now is because it's incredibly hard work and obviously no value when there's a gold standard available for free.

If you're choosing to start a business you should remember that this is true of your customers - if you start messing with things for the fun of it rather than because it provides obvious value, those customers will go somewhere else.