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> they have zero power to do anything related to consensus.
Suggest reading what Vitalik has to say if you're going to offer this kind of objection:
https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/papers/disc...
Infura collects upwards of 80 percent of the fees that flow into Ethereum and is in a position to control exactly who participates profitably. If your solution is "minority will fork" the obvious question is surely "with what scalable infrastructure?"
There is still no date but it's getting really close. You can track the progress here:
https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-rea...
Notably, there is only 2 testnet merges left to do. Ethereum has 3 testnets to try things out. One testnet has already merge and is running on PoS (Ropsten testnet). The merge was a success although it allowed to uncover some minor issues. The next one, called Sepolia, is happening this week. After that, there is only one other testnet merge to occur, likely in August. If all that goes well a date will be set.
Ethereum does have a way to force the death of PoW. The Ethereum protocol has always built-in the so-called "difficulty bomb". The difficulty bomb is simply a target date in the future when the mining difficulty starts rising exponentially. Making finding new blocks exponentially harder until the chain freezes to a halt. Its death is always coded-in, so to speak. The difficulty bomb needs to be delayed periodically so Ethereum can keep working. Last month the difficulty bomb was pushed a few months to occur in September. If all testing goes well, the merge will be triggered in September aligned with the difficulty bomb which will cause the death of PoW Ethereum.
You could argue that you can always fork Ethereum, remove the difficulty bomb, and run that instead. Which is true. Except there won't be economic value in that chain, so there won't be fee revenues to capture which means it won't be profitable to point your hash-power to this forked chain.