It’s no secret that Google has paid Mozilla handsomely for its search engine to be set default in the Firefox web browser for decades.
Mozilla’s financial report for 2023 revealed that the amount of money accrued from its “search deals” that year made up roughly three quarters of its entire income (specific amounts and from whom is confidential; it’s lumped together).
That figure is less than it used to be, but then so is Firefox’s market share </snark>
But this is why Google’s ongoing “wangle” with the Department of Justice in the United States poses a paradoxical and existential threat to Mozilla’s ability to keep Firefox alive.
Yo, DoJ: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
The DoJ is out to knee-cap Google to the point it is no longer walks like Google, including (but not limited to) being forced to sell Google Chrome, Android too perhaps, giving rivals access to its search index, and preventing it from making search distribution deals.
Like its one with Mozilla.
Big-tech rivals1 want Google carved up to benefit them; tech activists want it reined in for various reasons (including punishment for wrongthink and/or CEO choices); while 53.5% of social media[citation needed] users just want it torn limb-from-limb for the LOLs.
Yet here’s the thing: that contentious cash? It’s crucial to Mozilla being able to keep doing what it does — and what it does is vital for a healthy, thriving and varied open-source ecosystem.
Fact is, Google’s money pays the Mozilla engineers and developers who build Firefox and Gecko, the security engineers and researchers who keep the web as a whole safe, for the infrastructure, web dev documentation, and education – and its contributions to other source projects, like WebRTC.
Which is the semi-ironic rub in all this.
Google’s allegedly “anti-competitive” action of paying Mozilla to default to its search engine inarguably keeps one of Google’s loudest critic and competitors in business.
Mark Surman, President of Mozilla, has noted the unintended consequences:
This isn’t something we do because it’s profitable or easy. We do it because it matters. The DOJ’s proposal doesn’t just miss the mark, it risks handing even more power to dominant industry players like Google or Apple, not less.
President of Mozilla, Mark Surman
The economics of developing a modern, compatible, forward-looking web browser provided for free is simply far too fragile for those outside of the big tech tent.
Clearly, rival search engines haven’t offered to pay Mozilla the kind of money Google has since, y’know, Google is still the default in Firefox.
And if Google was to be prevented from being part of a future bidding process, what incentive would other search engines have to offer anything near the same price?
Mozilla needs Google’s search deal arguably far more more than Google (or any other search engine does) which is why it’s worried, and why the idea of it being indirectly told it’s now allow to material benefit from its own product is… Duff.
Mozilla is no fan of Google on the whole, but it is a fan of surviving. It may view Firefox as a “legacy product” these days, but Firefox remains its golden goose — Google pays to keep that goose fed!
Limiting Choice May Hurt Choice
Mozilla’s Chief Financial Officer, Eric Muhlheim, recently testified in the U.S. v. Google LLC search trial, laying out these exact concerns in fairly blunt terms.
This week, Mozilla put out a blog post expounding on the points he raised. They hammered home just how vital that search deal cash is to Firefox’s survival, but equally, how important Firefox’s survival is as a defence against Google and the rest of big tech:
Innovation, privacy and user choice can only thrive when browser engines compete. Without that, there’s no push to make the web faster, safer, or more inclusive. If we lose or weaken Gecko, the web will be optimized for commercial business models and priorities, not the values that Mozilla champions for the web such as privacy, accessibility and user choice. The open web only stays open if websites, apps, and content interoperate and work everywhere.
Mozilla
Those of you with long (enough) memories may recall that Mozilla has used a different search engine in the past. Only, it didn’t go well.
When Mozilla took Yahoo!’s money instead of Google’s, its own users rebelled. Many changed their search engine back to Google, others abandoned Firefox altogether:
Firefox users view Google as the best quality search engine. Mozilla experienced this firsthand when we switched the Firefox browser’s default search engine from Google to Yahoo between 2014 and 2017 in an effort to support search competition. Firefox users found Yahoo’s search quality lacking and some switched to Google search while others left the Firefox browser altogether.
Mozilla
And Mozilla wasn’t the only one to be burned by users preferring Google to Yahoo!
Remember when Ubuntu cut a deal with Yahoo! in 2010 to make it the default search engine in Firefox (overriding Mozilla’s default)? If you don’t, it’s because they had to switch back to Google very, very quickly after users (and Mozilla) complained!
A Web Without Firefox?
So where does this leave us?
Mozilla is on the money when it comes to criticising the proposed search deal restrictions.
Stopping Google from paying Mozilla money to make Google the default search engine will make n’ry a blip to search competition. Users can already change Firefox’s default search engine to whatever they want; Linux distros can override the default if they want.
But it will almost certainly result in reduced browser competition, handing more market share over to the likes of, er, Google, Apple, Microsoft and OpenAI, if they’re able to buy Google Chrome — companies with questionable interest in furthering the “open web” Mozilla fights for.
Therein lay the paradox: curtailing Google to improve competition could harm the competition the DoJ claims to want to promote.
And in the process, the open web most of us know and love might may become a lot less open.
As Ubuntu users, that matters. Firefox has long been a default browser across many distros, not just because it works well, but because its values align with those of the open source community.
If Google’s anti-trust woes end up taking Firefox down with it, we could find ourselves with fewer choices than before.
What do you think? Is Mozilla right to defend its search deal with Google, or is it wise to be exploring other ways of making money (hence the uptick in AI, sponsored results, terms of service, etc)? Let me know in the coments.
- Many having paid fealty to a certain political candidate in anticipation of getting first-dibs. ↩︎
Credits: OMGUbuntu.co.uk
