The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine
The Google antitrust ruling could be an existential threat to the future of Firefox | Financials show 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the...
Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox's revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser's default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla's ability to keep things "business as usual."
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company's actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search "partners completely," which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new "vision" of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google's money suddenly dried up.
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I would stand behind the idea of splitting Google in it's seperate branches with no shared assets. Basically Google search becomes is seperate corporation, Google AI, Google Webservices, Google Ad Services, YouTube. etc.. This will hopefully undo some of the webs enshitification since now the essentially most powerful company on the web has to actually offer good product for profit instead of compensating bad product with more profitable one.
That doesn't produce any practical competition however. Some vertical splitting of the search business seems reasonable so we end up with multiple companies doing search out of it.
How exactly would you break up search? You can't really do it geographically like the Bells.
If if wasn't American, I'd say nationalise it. Maybe at some point we'll need some kind of international version of nationalising.
Have a UN agency run it?
played a neat game that's basically a choose your own adventure where you play as president Bernie Sanders. It has this as a possible thing to do.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.molleindustria.demsocsim
Ah yes, cos that would lead to stellar leadership in Mozilla.