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Mozilla Fears 'Collateral Damage' in Google Antitrust Case (venturebeat.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Mozilla has responded to the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Google, but rather than commending the DOJ's action, the Firefox browser maker has voiced concerns that its commercial partnership could make it "collateral damage" in the fight against Google's alleged monopolistic practices. From a report: The DOJ, with support from 11 U.S. states, confirmed yesterday that it is suing Google for allegedly violating anti-competition laws by crowding out rivals in the internet search and advertising markets. "Small and independent companies such as Mozilla thrive by innovating, disrupting, and providing users with industry-leading features and services in areas like search," Mozilla chief legal officer Amy Keating wrote in a blog post. "The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations -- like Mozilla -- best positioned to drive competition and protect the interests of consumers on the web."

Mozilla has a long and complicated history with Google. In recent years, Mozilla has launched countless privacy campaigns against the internet giant's various online properties, and just last month it introduced a new browser add-on to crowdsource research into YouTube's opaque recommendation algorithm. On the other hand, Mozilla relies heavily on royalties from a search engine partnership with Google. The duo recently extended their deal to make Google the default search engine inside Firefox in the U.S. and other markets, which will reportedly secure Mozilla up to $450 million over the next three years.
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Mozilla Fears 'Collateral Damage' in Google Antitrust Case More

Mozilla Fears 'Collateral Damage' in Google Antitrust Case

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  • Shot yourself in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @12:36PM (#60631950)
    I believe that Mozilla has hurt itself more than this will effect them.

    • Well it was a case of shooting yourself in the foot, or getting shot in the head.

      When Mozilla Firefox started to come out on its own, and distance itself from being just an other Netscape. It needed some big partners to help prop it up. Google back in the day, was probably the best ally you had in order to slow down the dominance of IE.

      Back in the early 2000's Google was pushing the boundary on what HTML could do. Using JavaScript and DOM for more complex things than form data validation. Google wanted t

      • Using JavaScript and DOM for more complex things than form data validation.

        Anyone who EVER did client-side form validation deserved to get hacked.

        A former friend was so proud of his code that stupidly did that. I tried to explain why that was a bad idea, but I wasn't getting through. So got a shell on the very first attempt, typed in the command to delete everything, and asked him if I should press enter.

        But I'm sure there are still plenty of people doing that â¦

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Jack9 ( 11421 )

          > Anyone who EVER did client-side form validation deserved to get hacked.

          I don't think you understand what client-side form validation is for then. This doesn't preclude server-side validation.

          • Do it all server-side. Why bother with extra code on the client if you don't need it - it's just duplication of work and more chances for error.

            On the server you can check the bytes as they come over the wire (yes, I know, too many people are too lazy to do that). If you get a variable in the wrong order, or the number of bytes in that variable is too few/many, just stop reading from the socket, send a redirect to one of a list of gross sites, and close the socket.

            There's no reason to read more than yo

      • Your history is a little messy and you appear to be confused.

        It was surprisingly Microsoft who were pushing the boundary of what JavaScript could do, they introduced css and Ajax; and it was (again) surprisingly MS who looked-into and even wrote a research paper about a multi-process browser and an OS based on web technologies.

        Google contributed almost nothing to the web, not to the standards or anything - it was primarily Mozilla and Opera engineers who developed HTML5, and Google came along much later by

        • Whoops - credit where credit is due - it was also Apple (with Mozilla and Opera) who pushed the web forward with JavaScript and HTML through the WHATWG group.

    • And nothing of value will be lost.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      That's all right, you can bet, that opinion by Mozilla was bought and paid for by Google ;DDD.

  • Mozilla is a good case in favor of Goole (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @12:48PM (#60632004) Journal
    Mozilla tried to switch default search. People HATED it.

    The argument that the reason Google is the top because of its purchasing default options doesn't hold water with me. I say this because every time something uses a different default I see articles about how people are irritated with it and want to change to Google.

    This isn't to say I think Alphabet isn't a monopoly, or isn't abusing their position, I'm simply saying that from where I am the case being made seems weak.

    The fact that their position in search gives them extra data exclusive to them and allows them to therefore dominate in ads (aside from closed platforms like Facebook or Amazon) is a much better case. They are leveraging their search dominance to also have ad dominance seems like a classic case of monopoly to me. Similar with email. A reasonable solution is to split search, ads, and cloud (including email) and force search/email to auction ad placement with equal access to the information used for placement. whichever company wants to keep the wild and weird stuff wing can do it (I'd assume search since the image processing mixes well with the self driving).

    Unless someone can provide good data that people would be happy with other search engines and their results I can't imagine the case as it is framed going forward.

    • Re:Mozilla is a good case in favor of Goole (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @01:05PM (#60632086)

      Agreed.

      Lets remember that Microsoft still controls the worlds #1 computing platform, AND the default browser that ships inside it, AND the default search engine deployed in it.

      Yet Google is still the #1 search engine. And Chrome is the #1 web browser on Windows. Neither of these are happening because Microsoft is pushing them - quite the opposite. People are going out of their way to switch to Google.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )
        Do OEMS ship with Edge as default?

        It's been a while since I've purchased a computer, but they used to include browsers in the crapware I thought.

      • Microsoft still controls the worlds #1 computing platform

        The #1 computing platform has been the smartphone for years.

        Android has the largest share of the market, Apple IOS has the largest share of the profits (as much as all the other smartphone manufacturers combined).

        Microsoft abandoned the field because they couldn't make Apple-style profit margins off the hardware.

      • Lets remember that Microsoft still controls the worlds #1 computing platform, AND the default browser that ships inside it, AND the default search engine deployed in it.

        Only in the USA. In Europe where they are forced to offer default search their market share is lower.

        People are going out of their way to switch to Google.

        People don't like change and stick to what they are used to. Yet... Bing has a 33% market share in the USA. Yes *that* Bing. That's a lot of people and a clear example that alternatives to Google are okay for some.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @04:52PM (#60632926)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • What you are saying is that Mozilla is in no position to "drive competition" in the search market.

      But Mozilla is making the claim that they ARE in a position to "drive competition" in the search market. Its literally quoted in the summary.

      Cant have it both ways.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )
        What I'm saying is that search is actually competitive (in quality) since it's hard to create lock-in.

        Size gives an advantage in producing quality results (for the lowest common denominator anyway), as does tracking everyone everywhere, but when people are given non Google defaults, it doesn't seem to sway them from Google.

        I guess it makes a difference in the margins (Google is only 87% of desktop search rather than 95% of mobile), but it seems to me pretty strong evidence that the problem isn't default opt

    • 99.999% of the time DuckDuckGo finds what I am looking for. I have purposely searched on Google exactly zero times in the last 12 months. I've also witnessed gobs of users at my company start using Edge simply because it is the default after certain updates, and Bing search since it is the default there... almost zero comments about it from end users. So I just don't buy that users "HATED" switching from Google to another search engine.

      Regarding Mozilla, I love their browser and will stick with it. They bet

    • The argument that the reason Google is the top because of its purchasing default options doesn't hold water with me. I say this because every time something uses a different default I see articles about how people are irritated with it and want to change to Google.

      That's a chicken and egg problem there. People don't like change and have gone through many years of Google being the default pushed down their throats thanks to its incredibly market power. A large part of the problem is "the results aren't like google". Not that the results are bad, they just aren't the kind of results they would expect to see for the search which they've been conditioned to consider "good".

      Change is bad. You can see that universally. People reject sudden change.

      Unless someone can provide good data that people would be happy with other search engines and their results I can't imagine the case as it is framed going forward.

      I'd be interested in seein

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )
        I see more like 12% here. And it is likely the default on many of these (desktop share) https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america.

        You're right though, it'd be hard to test, I like Google for it's info breakout sections as much as results (often I don't even need the results), and even better breakouts with better UI would annoy me since my eyes know where to look on Google.

        I haven't used Bing for a long time, but the actual results made me angry they were so bad

        • Google can be bad too, but it's rare that switching search engines solves my problem when I can't find it with google

          You should try Bing for porn ;-)

    • But Google IS spending billions on purchasing those defauts. Is this philanthropist spending?

      But I do sort of agree with you. To charge someone with Monopolistic behaviour, they need to prove harm to consumers. The suit that they filed spent most of its time trying to show that Google stifled search innovation, degrading the searching behaviour of customers. But they do this by taking it as fact that quality search is created by having scale. The more data you have, the more customers you have, the better s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )
        I follow what you're

        I assume it's a mixture of:
        1) goodwill
        2) wanting their to be 2 browser engines
        3) having a different group innovating and approaching problems from different ways (asm.js for example).
        4) it still makes them money (8% difference in mobile vs desktop search almost certainly worth over a billion a year in revenue for the mobile segment (assumption being desktop search is with minimal google placed as default, google has 87% desktop, 95% mobile).

        If the paying for placement is profitable, I do
  • Mozilla ruined the internet more than google, they took the good will of power users and open source advocates and made Firefox a laughing stock. Hopefully the antitrust cases kills off both Chrome and Firefox and leaves a gap for a true independent browser foundation to take their place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      It's FOSS, go make your own browser.
      • You don't need to base a new browser off GPL code. Make it proprietary and sell it. Give the ability to disable JavaScript either by site or globally. Block connections to 3rd party sites. Ignore the css !important tag that overrides my display preferences. Doesn't display emojis.

        • Why would you trust a non-open source commercial browser?

          Even if you pay for it, it won't be working in your interest within a few iterations as the vendor continues to search for more revenue opportunities. That is the history of much of commercial software.

          Just look at Microsoft Windows. You pay for it and it spies on you!

          • Why would I trust an open-source browser any more than a closed source browser?

            The whole many eyes make all bugs shallow thing was a lie, as evidenced by security bugs hiding in plain sight for more than a decade.

            Most users don't give a shit if something is open or closed source - as evidenced by all the open source fanatics running closed source Windows to run their closed source games.

            Apple can sell their phones with a 40% profit margin because among other things they're selling privacy and long te

        • If the browser isn't FOSS I'm not using it. I don't trust that kind of crap to be my gateway to the internets.

      • Do you also cheat a group of people and smugly tell them to be smarter? Firefox was great because of addons - thing that Google would never introduce because it would allow wrestling control out of Google. Everyone had their own favorite addons installed just the way they liked it.

        Mozilla shat on those developers who invested in XUL for years and years. Those developers are gone. Palemoon is here. Those developers don't want to port them and they cannot be blamed.

      • Making a web browser has been compared to making an OS. Both are gargantuan tasks not suitable for anything less than 50 people on a unified team of high caliber technical skills and good team leads. Most of those 50 people would almost certainly question why they are making another browser engine and ultimately leave for less stressful territory like video game development. Just because something is open source does not mean it can be developed and managed by just anyone. That's why there have only bee

        • That's bs

          The basic browser is only complicated because W3 fucked up repeatedly. Too many standards for stuff that needs to be optional.

          JavaScript support? The biggest security hole on the Internet. Make it optional.

          Emojis? Not needed. Make it optional.

          HTML 5? Not needed. Make it optional.

          Ajax? A bad idea. Make it optional.

          Embedded video and sound rendering? Not needed. PDF rendering? Not needed. CSs? Not needed.

          If bare-bones browsers like links and lynx can do it, why not a barebones graphica

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tflf ( 4410717 )

      Mozilla ruined the internet more than google, they took the good will of power users and open source advocates and made Firefox a laughing stock. Hopefully the antitrust cases kills off both Chrome and Firefox and leaves a gap for a true independent browser foundation to take their place.

      The hard economic reality is Mozilla needs to reclaim a decent sized base from among the great unwashed, uniformed average users who are using Google, and see little reason to move. A blatantly superior product would help in that quest, but, it has to be seen as superior by the aforementioned vast majority of internet users.

      Fortunately, it appears you might have both the insight, and business acumen, to provide, Mozilla, or any other interested party, an alternate business plan by which they can survive, an

      • Users were giving Mozilla an alternate business plan for a decade. Told them to stop with the IX designer crap, Pocket, all the other side projects, and concentrate on making a browser that didn't try to ape every single change to the UI that Chrome made.

        They didn't listen, and market share dropped from 25% to 2%.

        And there will be no more money for search placement because they're just going to keep on not listening until they're broke. Like the attempt to pivot to being a VPN provider - was there a la

  • Helpful link (Score:3, Funny)

    by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @12:59PM (#60632052)
    Stockholm syndrome [wikipedia.org]

  • Being the default isn't anti-consumer (Score:3)

    by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @01:02PM (#60632078)

    Past anti-trust has been against entrenched monopolies... oil producers controlling 90% of supply, long distance telephone calls were only offered by one company, microsoft with their "per-processor" bulk windows pricing. This case is a new argument... that getting business simply from being the default is anti-consumer. I had no trouble changing the default search engine in firefox, and I had choices when I did so... startpage, duckduckgo, bing, any search engine I could find. Is the government's case that consumers are too dumb to change defaults? That public good is served by a broad distribution of default search engines installed across devices?

    • 80% has been the standard market share threshold since at least the 70s. Google exceeds that in several areas, and is effectively a monopoly.

    • I agreed with you before I read the suit document. Google is openly spending billions to prevent competition and lock down devices with not only default search providers, but much more as well. Since Google simply is the best search on the market, the direct and immediate effect on consumers is not huge, but the effort Google is putting into their monopoly is tremendous and clearly illegal. It was the MS emails showing MSes motives that make the suit against them "succeed" as much as anything.

  • antitrust law is meant to prevent. If a good chunk of Mozilla's revenue is from Google, then guess what? Mozilla is controlled by Google in everything but name. There is another kind of organization that exerts practical control over a nominally independent business: it's called the mafia.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > If the board had stood with Eich, they'd be riding high right now.

      No, they wouldn't. The whole reason we even heard about this is his own employees complained about having to suddenly work for him. Brilliant first day for such a talented CEO. /s

  • Mozilla Corporation, the actual maker of Firefox, is not small. They have ~750 employees (plus a gazillion volunteers), which makes it a mid-sized company. Nor are they independent - they are subsidary of Mozilla Foundation. Both statements are therefore patently false.

    Mozilla: Please just stick to making a standards-compliant web browser that doesn't send telemetry data to you. It's the only thing you are somewhat good at. Also, be the first to implement innovative technical solutions that get rid of

    • They can't. They fired the 250 developers so they could pivot into becoming a for-profit business. After all, the real money was being paid to management, not developers, and management will always protect themselves.

      Of course nobody is going to buy their VPN service. They're too late to the game and overpriced. The Mozilla brand ain't what it used to be.

  • Irrelevancy (Score:5, Informative)

    by nateman1352 ( 971364 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @01:59PM (#60632302)

    Between the constant layoffs [mozillalifeboat.com] of Mozilla's engineering staff and the huge spending on "advocacy" (aka galas where people talk about how important the open web is) and the huge executive pay, Mozilla is not the organization is used to be. The only reason they care about Firefox at all is because the Google search deal keeps the money trains coming in. They have minimized R&D on Firefox to the bare minimum level necessary to keep it sorta functional. Mozilla is a shell of its former self after being hollowed out by MBAs. At this point if they go away I would not shed one tear.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arQon ( 447508 )

      The problem is that now that the MBAs and greedy execs HAVE wrecked Mozilla, I'm not saying your disgust with the organisation isn't unwarranted, but if (when) it does "go away" you'll be losing the only meaningfully-private PC browser with a market share that registers at all.

      Google has already leveraged gmail, YouTube, and its other websites to push Chrome into utter dominance of the PC browser market: and as AvitarX pointed out earlier in the thread, THAT'S where the monopoly abuse is and where a compete

  • I think it'd make sense as part of an anti-trust settlement for Apple and Google (and MS) to fund Firefox Dev to the tune of 500+ full-time developers, and at the expense of their own browsers.

    - Apple still doesn't allow FF or any other rendering engine to work on iOS. This should be a constant point of complaint in the /. community, but it is hardly ever discussed.

    - Likewise, Google has poured $$ into Chrome, and again to what end? Both companies leverage their browsers (not talking about anything else her

    • What's wrong with using the system rendering engine on any host? Native controls like edit boxes, buttons, etc.

      It's the right way to do it instead of wasting time, energy, and battery trying to make your own rendering engine.

      Firefox on iOS is as shitty as Firefox on Linux, and as shitty as any browser in the last decade. But such is progress when UX experts make the decisions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jamienk ( 62492 )

        The thing that's wrong is that Apple doesn't allow it, and they can only do that because they make the OS. (The issue of native controls is different -- browsers can use "native" controls without using a "native" rendering engine.) Mozilla has already made their own rendering engine, and they have a lot of experience with it. They wouldn't be wasting their time because they'd be able to focus on things that users might want, but that go against what is in Apple or Google's strategic plan. (Good ad blocking,

  • Collateral damage only applies if you are not the enemy.

    The suit makes it clear that Google is being investigated for monopolistic behaviour because of the contracts Mozilla signed with it, and others like that contract. If those contracts are illegal, Mozilla is an accomplice. If what Google is doing is wrong, Mozilla obviously cannot claim innocence; They not only benefited, but every cent of their revenue is due to this illegal activity..

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