Mozilla, which in 2023 received about 75 percent of its revenue from royalties paid by Google and other search providers for search engine usage in Firefox, worries that the US Justice Department's proposed ban on the very same Google Search payments would be rather harmful.
American federal prosecutors last week filed their
revised proposed remedies [PDF] in their case against Google to restore competition in the web search market, which the internet titan was found to have
unlawfully monopolized.
The Feds dropped a prior recommendation to force Google to sell off its AI investments, but still want Google to shed its Chrome browser and to prohibit the mega-corp's search-related payments to distribution partners such as Apple and Mozilla – their browsers "distribute" Google Search by making it the default search engine.
Google's payments to Apple for making its search service the default in the Safari browser, which reached
around $20 billion in 2022, discouraged competition, as the Justice Department argued and the court agreed. However, by banning such payments to browser makers, the government's remedy could choke off Mozilla's primary revenue source, putting its operations (and non-trivial
executive paychecks) at risk.
"These proposed remedies prohibiting search payments to small and independent browsers miss the bigger picture – and the people who will suffer most are everyday internet users,” said Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, in
a statement Monday.
"Independent browsers like Firefox are on the frontlines of protecting consumer privacy, driving browser innovation, and giving people real choice on how they experience the web. But instead of promoting a fair fight, the DOJ’s remedies would tilt the playing field further into the hands of a few dominant players, diminishing consumer choice and weakening the broader internet ecosystem."
We note Mozilla's recent ventures into the
advertising business and
its revisions to the language describing its privacy commitments and data handling have.................................
www.theregister.com
