Or in other words ... “We need Google’s money” ... Firefox
This only ends with Mozilla getting less money since without Google bidding the value of the placement goes down.
Just as the Microsoft antitrust case was never about whether it was legal to bundle a browser with an OS, but whether Microsoft's particular act of doing so was illegally leveraging a monopoly in the desktop OS market into other markets, the Google case isn't about whether its legal to pay to set a search engine as a default but whether by doing so Google was illegally protecting an existing search monopoly.
You can't just ignore the relevance of the market power premise of antitrust cases to which it is central and pretend they are about the actions without regard to market power.
It might strengthen the US's case that there is an antitrust problem, but if the remedies don't actually fix the problem but instead make things worse, it certainly undercuts their case for the remedy.
This DOJ lawsuit is basically a gift to Google if you actually think through what it is likely to achieve, and what a better targeted lawsuit could have achieved but won't, because DOJ chose to instead spend its resources on a weak case for an issue that is largely irrelevant to Google's moat.
Owning #1 and having the rather distant #2 beholden to you makes it even less likely that a market upstart will be able to emerge; particularly when #1 and #2 are loss leaders.
You need to look at why Google's adtech is so obscenely profitable, why they are able to generate so much profit per user. A lot of it is powered by things that either already are or should be illegal, from various abuses of monopolistic power to forced tracking without informed consent.
Fixing those issues would be a good start. Otherwise, nothing will change. Google has enough of its own moat with Pixel devices and Android and Chrome that banning or somehow restricting the sale of default search engine position will hurt sellers of those defaults like Mozilla much more than it will hurt Google's monopoly.
Just because the lawsuit is on paper targeted at Google, doesn't mean that their competitors (or the public) will be the beneficiaries of its results.
Google being the highest bidder, i.e. paying "prices that can not be replicated by others" does not make an antitrust case alone. By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc.
Buying competitors (DoubleClick) is the kind of stuff that should have been prevented on antitrust grounds, but that is not related to the search box transaction at all, and is not the focus of this lawsuit.
I don't know any billionaire who has cornered the market for real estate, art, etc. Your example just shows that there is something special about the web search market: it was cornered by Google using several strategies that amount to monopoly.
Once again, do you think Microsoft doesn't have the same money as Google to pay for default search placement? Or do you think Apple or Mozilla won't take their money? I'm sure Microsoft has the money. They just don't want to spend it on this because they don't earn as much money from their search users as Google does, so Google outbids them.
You keep talking about generalities of Google's monopoly position, but I'm not disputing that their monopoly position is problematic and should be reigned it.
What I'm saying is that this particular lawsuit succeeding will at best be a wash all things considered, and at worst will entrench Google's moat even further if it kills off Mozilla.
Or, if you don't think so, what kind of court-imposed solution do you think will come out of this lawsuit?
The point of anti-trust is not to look at a single legal transaction and criminalize it, but to see the pattern of anti-competitive behavior and stop it.
> what kind of court-imposed solution do you think will come out of this lawsuit?
Like in other anti-trust cases, the obvious solution should be to break up the company so that it cannot control the search market as it does today. I think this should be a great solution for consumers and even for Google shareholders.
Microsoft wasn't broken up. Google, when they recently faced a similar (although not identical) lawsuit in EU about search defaults, ended up implementing a search engine choice screen on Android where the position and presence of other search engines were determined by an auction. So something that was previously free, even though inconvenient, was now bringing Google extra money. How's that for antitrust. And as a bonus, DDG was outbid and not present on that choice screen at all, even though before that lawsuit they were the most popular non-Google option that people chose.
I think we need much better, tech-giant-aware antitrust laws before we can take on the likes of Google. Too bad the various levels of government right now are... well, you know.
Well, I guess we'll see how this works out eventually. Speculation can only go so far.
...If they force Google to divest Chrome, it's not going to be a gift.
All this is proving is there is no effective alternative to breaking Google up and selling it off in parts.
Before I even clicked the link, while hovering over it, I thought "I wonder how close they're going to come in this response to biting the hand that feeds them... How are they going to possibly handle this?"
It is my understanding that something like 95% of mozilla's gross revenue each year comes from the google search commission deal. If I am wrong on this somebody please correct me.
"We need money. Due to Google monopolistic position, it's Google's money for now."
Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome.
From my subjective experience, the only people I see using it today are technical.
Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible.
As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that.
What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?
Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening.
So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.
https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox
Still, I am nowhere near wanting to switch to a Google product - Firefox would have to become really bad for me to consider that - and I see no other browser even remotely close to replacing Firefox for me. It's still "good enough".
I even keep an ancient Firefox version installed in /opt, because I need it to run a small proprietary Java applet for work, but that's another topic. :)
> /opt
From what I understand, the slowness was primarily on Mac (a high-dpi rendering issue) and sometimes Windows (don't recall if there was a specific issue or just several small things that added up). On linux these issues tended not to exist, or at least be nowhere near as bad.
But they kept on removing various cool and useful features just because their telemetry showed that they were only used by a small percentage of users, claiming that they need to save money and focus on things people use the most. Naturally, that leads to the world's blankiest blank of a browser, to borrow a bit of Futurama vernacular.
Is that so? What are the numbers? And how do they look absolute? Is there an absolute decline in firefox use? Or just a relative one? Which of those really matter?
Absolute numbers: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
The numbers are worse when you look at American data alone. It looks like Firefox is slowly shedding users. Probably because of Mozilla's questionable practices recently (the enlarged awesome bar, the layoffs, etc).
US data does show a very small downtrend on some graphs, but so small, that it hardly counts as "trend", IMO.
The monthly active users chart for Firefox shows that the last time there were 250M+ active users was April 2019 and the last time there were 240M+ active was October of that year. The graph as presented shows a very slight curve downward, it would be more clear if the Y axis started at 200M (which would however bring about its own caveats - data visualization sucks).
2010: 2 billion internet users, firefox has 30% market share => 600mio absolute users.
2019: 4.1 billion internet users, firefox has 4% market share => 165mio absolute users.
That's of course very rough and may be a severly off, but the absolute number of firefox users seem to have shrunk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...
However, when you simply multiply "browser share" with "amount of 'internet' users, you may very well make some grave mistakes. E.g. does "Browsing Tinder" count as 'internet user'? Someone updating their instagram app? If so, you do miss a lot and maybe the numbers go very far in either direction when corrected?
Note that the denominator for market share as measured by StatCounter is "page views", not "browser users".
So for example, say you have 4.1 billion users, who use their laptop and phone evenly for their web browsing. On their phone, none of them use Firefox. All of them load the same number of pages every day. In this scenario, 4% of page views corresponds to 8% of users using Firefox on laptop.
Note that these are not realistic assumptions, of course: people vary widely in terms of how many pages they load, vary widely in terms of how their web activity is split between mobile and non-mobile, etc. For example, in 2010, I would bet that the average Firefox user used the web more than the average IE user, so the StatCounter number for Firefox was inflated compared to the actual fraction of users using Firefox.
If you want to measure actual number of Firefox users, you need to use a data service that tries to measure users instead of page views (i.e. not StatCounter).
As the world goes mobile, that by itself is disquieting for Mozilla.
The current mobile situation is:
* iPhone: can't run Firefox there at all, really. There's Firefox for iOS based on WebKit like everything else on iOS, but I don't even know that StatCounter would count it as "Firefox".
* Android: Google for a long time had (and in many cases continues to have, as far as I know) agreements with OEMs that forbid a default browser other than Chrome. In some cases those agreements forbid preinstalling a non-Chrome browser at all, even as non-default. So you have to rely on people downloading an extra browser from the app store, and people don't do that much.
In addition to all that, "mobile" sites tended to be written to "WebKit", not "standards", for a while for various historical reasons. Unfortunately, at this point that's pretty deeply ingrained and people continue to do that, albeit with "Blink or WebKit" replacing "WebKit", which entrenches the problem.
* it could come with an alternative app store
* maps can be used as a web app (how is that different from Firefox OS?)
But yes it would look more like Amazon's offering than Google's. Look where microg is now, though. That is without Mozilla's backing.
Not as snappy or polished as chrome on android to be honest.
I personally switched to it because I felt I give enough data to Google as it is. Probably not a great reason, because they still get a lot of data from me.
Firefox blocks many trackers, including Google Analytics, by default.
Chrome does not block trackers by default, and has been known to connect to Analytics even with plugins meant to block it.
Hence the numbers will show FF basically as non existing. Which is just where G wants them to be.
They do have some stats based on their own (much maligned) analytics, but nothing that can be used comparatively (at least AFAIK - would be happy to hear otherwise).
Firefox blocks third-party cookies used for tracking, not first-party, which is what GA uses. [1] The story that spread last year that Firefox blocks GA turned out to be a myth.
I don't know why you're trying to promote a narrative that Firefox is far more popular than analytics show, but that's simply not true. Heck, just dump user agent headers on your own websites and measure those -- nobody's blocking that.
[1] https://www.upbuild.io/blog/firefox-google-analytics-data/
Similar: according to GA we had 0 people using Brave, Opera Mini or Icecat, yet the logs did show a (statistically insignificant) handfull of users using that.
So, while there is no technical reason why firefox might be underrepresented, there is a practical and explainable difference in some cases.
Edit: when I say "noticable", I mean that it could be percieved, not that it orders of magnitude or even significan enough to matter for the business or our choices.
Only at that time Firefox had a massive advantage because of enthusiasm and an API that allowed for crazy things, up to allowing extensions like IE tab that, on Windows, would allow you to run certain sites with an IE web view inside a Firefox tab..!
The problem isn't that Google is the only company that can pay due to their monopolistic position, it's that they're the only company willing to pay that wouldn't require Mozilla to compromise their key principles and their browser - probably because they're good enough that they're confident people actually want to use them.
I wasn’t aware of this or that it was even possible to not be able to switch search providers. What is the biggest example of Bing being forced on an install base without the ability to switch?
The only example I know of Bing is the setup in Windows for IE/Edge. And iOS toyed with it for a while but has stuck with google.
Even if it is, in fact, the best choice for Mozilla even if money is involved doesn't mean Mozilla will see it that way over stacks offered by Microsoft. So, if it's valuable to Google, it's worth them paying for to assure the decision, whether or not Mozilla should rationally be expected to choose the same thing anyway.
Google dominates the browser market... Firefox is down to single digit marketshare. If Firefox is gone, it's pretty much just Safari on mobile... and who else? (Chrome forks don't count.)
As far as Firefox's hands being tied: they had a deal with Yahoo starting in 2015 for 5 years.. and they terminated it in 2017 when their contract gave them an opportunity. So that should say something about Firefox's choice in the matter.
I'd guess that as far as regulators are concerned, Chrome forks count just fine.
I've always viewed it more as protection money/a bribe to not block ads by default. Not just to Firefox, but to Apple, Samsung, et. al.
It was briefly annoying, but I just switched it back, so it wasn't a big deal. Defaults matter, but if you're using Firefox, you're probably less likely to accept an inferior default than most people.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea...
It could be that Mozilla's role in the whole scheme of things is to act as 'Plausible Deniability' defense for big G.
Which is, probably, what that Mozilla's current CEO lawyer is there for.
Google needed to get rid of Brendan Eich (Mozilla's CEO that was to browsers, like Bill Gates to Windows) - for the plausible deniability defense to work [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
I don't think there should be a default. New users should be presented a list to select their preferred search engine. This could be an educational effort; many users are likely unaware that there are alternatives. Many users don't care, because they don't understand the difference. A brief onboarding experience would help increase awareness, and it would avoid the codependency problem Mozilla itself created.
In a hypothetical situation where you separate Google Ads from Google Search from Google everything else, Google search would still want to pay browsers for default search, and Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc would still have a revenue stream; however, they would only be able to do so to the extent of their web search revenues. Likely the baby Googles are still dominant in all of their fields, but it's not as assured, because there will be less cross promotion, exclusivity, and tying.
If you instead leave Google whole, and prohibit paying browsers for default search, you still have internal payments (de facto, if not explicit) to Chrome and Android that drive product decisions like defaults and putting an unremovable search bar in the default launcher.
If Google is banned from protecting it's monopoly by buying default position, no one else would be affected unless they first replaced Google’s monopoly.
> or at least they'd no longer be bidding against Google
This, however, is a real issue. The only reason Bing offers big numbers is to force Google to offer more.
I'm not sure my opinion of this should happen or that should happen matters one bit. In the US Republicans and Democrats hate Google. In the EU the regulators detest them. In China they are locked out of the market and its a laugh that any executives think they would be allowed in. What that means is Google has almost no political capital today and is basically fucked, short of the billions of dollars they will spend on lawyers.
What Google is or isn't banned from doing depends on how the end "Google" looks. The pending state AG charges likely will cover a lot more of those details. The DOJ thing was known to have been rushed, they wanted it filed this past summer, but this week probably was the last possible window prior to the election. Ironically while the DOJ is now accused of rushing this case because of White House pressure, the Democrat State AGs are saying there actually should be more charges against Google, not less.
That doesn't make things look better for Google, it makes them much worse than we've seen so far. Google today certainly looks a lot different then during the Obama administration when a Google lobbyist or employee would visit the White House on average once a week. What happened there is a mystery to me.
There are multiple possible outcomes here. Who knows when anything will happen, but, my guess is some combination of these things, but not all together -
- Split the search ad business from search engine
- Divest Chrome/Android from Alphabet
- Force them in to some transparent search ad exchange arrangement, meaning not just advertisers but other search engines
Whatever the outcome here, Microsoft is probably the biggest winner. Facebook wins in terms of any incremental ad dollars they gain from Google advertisers. Amazon is also positioned very well if they chose to take advantage of it.
Apple is probably in the worst shape next to Google, as it is estimated 15%-20% of their profits come from the Google arrangement. Combined with changes to Apple's tax rates globally, I could see this chopping Apple's value in half. If 50% of Google's US search traffic is coming from Apple, and half of the users who actually click on ads and buy stuff never leave the default search, the outcome for Alphabet's finances is really, really bad.
This matters a lot. There are users who install adblockers and will directly navigate to google.com no matter what. Those users are worthless to Google. The users that matter are the ones who don't change the default search, possibly click ads for every single search they do that has ads for the top results, and those users do buy things after clicking the ads. If Google lost half of those users, do the math.
Google/Alphabet's cash cow is paid search ads. Anything that sticks a wrench in this business model will bring an end to their golden age of doing a bunch of stuff that loses money while riding a tsunami of background cash flow. If they are split up, meaning Search, Ads, and Youtube, that probably is the best $ outcome for shareholders longer term, and Alphabet's ultra wealthy employees probably still get sick stock options.
I googled it: "Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement"
Is this widely known enough to be used without an explanation? I'd never come across it before.
I would argue that it's not laziness on my part - it makes things jarring to read. And HN becomes less pleasant the more people that do it.
Yeah, I'm also not a fan of the use of non-obvious acronyms for common phrases, but I think this case is different in that it's more of a concept. It even has a Wikipedia article[1]. Even if they provided the expansion of the acronym in their comment, one might feel that they should also explain a little about the concept before referring to it, since the general audience cannot be expected to know about it. However, that would distract from the point the comment is meant to make.
Since the comment is not about what BATNA is, it's better to focus writing on the point it's trying to get across, even if it ends up limiting the intended audience. Those that are not familiar with it are better served by looking it up, anyways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
I'm not sure why the Firefox people haven't split from Mozilla to rectify this. What's keeping them there? Didn't Thunderbird devs split? What am I missing?
Because it is their job! Do you have a rival company to hire all these people?
Also, their funding initiatives to change the web are total BS. They don't want to change anything. They will only fund projects that reinforce the established order and help to lock out the competition. They like things just as they are. They have no idea what it's like to actually be the little guy.