I wonder who's funding Mozilla in this proxy fight? They seem to be struggling just to stay alive with their core product, Firefox. I can't see how they can justify fighting expensive legal battles on a whim to shareholders.
The Foundation does not have shareholders. It does have a board that it presumably needs to justify their actions to. Those actions presumably need to align with https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ and https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ better than other uses of the same money to be justified.
So the real question is whether there is something that Mozilla be doing to achieve the goals those two documents described that would be a better investment of money and that it's not already doing. Do you know of something offhand?
[Disclaimer: I work for the Mozilla Corporation, on Firefox, and was not involved in the decision to file this lawsuit in any way.]
Obviously, they're using their Search and Mail monopolies to push those formats, and speaking of search, we've been talking a lot about where our information comes from online and how accurate it is. A better Internet means we need to do better at that, and we need alternatives than a global centralized search engine operated by a corporation with a significant political agenda.
Note that I'm asking this seriously. If there are things we could be doing that are useful and effective and we aren't doing them, I'd like to know and see if I can poke people to fix that.
But in terms of outright litigation such as the headline, why not cover how Google mandates manufacturers include Chrome as the default web browser on Android, say, over Firefox, a better option that protects it's users better? (Particularly by tying that requirement to get the Play Store, this is one of the most flagrantly illegal business plays in our time.) The "new Microsoft" has become far worse than the old one.
In a more ethereal way, it'd be nice if it felt like Mozilla was pushing harder to lead the way on web standards too. It seems like everything new in web is coming from El Goog, and comes with strings attached (namely, heavily cloud service-dependent design). It's hard to really define this one, but I hope you get the gist.
This all being said, I am super happy with Mozilla's recent work to bring Firefox back to being the best browser, a status I'm not sure I felt it had since 4.0 or so, but one I feel it definitely has earned back.
As far as Google's anti-competitive practices, I know people have been looking at them. I am not a lawyer; it's unclear to me how easy it is to bring private suits about that sort of thing (as opposed to governments bringing antitrust suits).
Fully agreed on the web standards bit. Part of the problem there is simply manpower. Google is throwing a _lot_ of people at standards bodies... :(
Considering that the carriers are the ones who actually control the gate, they should be focusing on them.
Almost all information travels through and is monitored, filtered, and censored by Google. At multiple levels, including the browser, the operating system, email services, search/discovery, and more. And as Google moves into pushing companies to migrate their data about you to Google, you no longer even have the choice to look for alternatives. For example, RCS messaging is moving text messaging systems over to Google servers, and there's nothing you can do about it, because it's a carrier-level decision.
Google has recently bragged to advertisers it gets 70% of all credit and debit card transaction data in the US. Even if you don't do business with Google or use any Google services, everything ends up feeding back to them through one way or another.
Meanwhile, apart from areas which aren't very profitable to be an ISP, most people have at least some options for ISPs, even if they aren't good options, and most ISP conduct can either be opted out of or circumvented with ease.
If you are worried about censorship, privacy, and fairness on the Internet, and you're worried about ISPs, you're being sorely misled. And guess who's been paying for all the marketing about how bad the ISPs are? https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html
Being concerned about ISPs, especially with NN being repealed, is not being misled at all. It's being prudent.
ISPs cannot silence people. If they could, you wouldn't hear everyone whining about net neutrality. But Google can render a site effectively nonexistent from the Internet, and most of your communications goes either to or from a Google server at some point, whether it's a website, an email, a text, or a phone call. Statistically, you likely also use a phone running Google software, use a web browser made by Google, and use Google as your primary email account, which potentially grants them access to all of the data in all of your other accounts. (That's before we add in that Google's now in the ISP game, and both your landline and mobile ISP could also be Google.)
In fact, the only way to convey a message and be confident Google can't intercept it or block it, is to drive to someone and tell them in person.
...Until Google drives your car, too.
Not true in most of the US.
...Source?
The abuse of public right-of-ways, franchise negotiations, and unreasonable permitting processes have much more of a negative impact to broadband expansion.
Fault is irrelevant to the falsity of the claim that broadband providers that have been covered by net neutrality cannot, with the repeal of those rules, effectively censor content because customers have a choice of many such providers.
Whoever's fault it is, the fact is that most customers do not have a choice of many providers.
This also doesn't account for a variety of other ways to get Internet, which I described above, such as mobile access.
Just a little less than 50% have less than two providers. Two is far short of "many".
> and qualified with a specific speed minimum which is...
...exactly the current regulatory minimum downstream speed of broadband (which is the domain to which net neutrality applied), and, per the current, anti-neutrality FCC, met by the majority of home wireline connections. [0]
[0] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/305578/fcc-pr...
In the FCC's numbers, if you have a census tract wherein one household has access to AT&T, one other household has access to Comcast, and none of the other households have any access to any ISP at all, that's a census tract with two providers. I suspect there aren't any census tracts where the situation is quite that extreme, but I suspect many "competitive" census tracts have at least some households that actually only have one option.
That said, at least census-tract aggregation is better than the zip-code level aggregation that preceded it...
"-- Mozilla booked $323 million in royalties in 2014, up about 7% from the year earlier."
Better?
"Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation and all subsidiaries) for CY 2016 was $520M (US), as compared to $421M in 2015."
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...
Mozilla is acting as a Google puppet. I'm sure they didn't risk breaking a 5 year deal with Yahoo for nothing.
"The majority of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue is from royalties earned through Firefox web browser search partnerships and distribution deals around the world."
Their revenue is up more than $100 million from last year so they're not exactly dying.
How do you figure they're barely surviving? How does that make them a Google puppet? What exactly is your point through this thread?
If you think it's news that they take Google's money I'm not sure you're qualified to be making these sorts of claims.