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  • If tech giants such as Google cannot be broken up, then their services should be required to be compatible and all data exportable to competitors. See the EFFʼs “Competitive Compatibility” concept. Buy a movie off Google's YouTube but Google misbehaves? It must be exportable to a market competitor that you do support. Don't like how Google handles your email? You should be able to switch your email address to a competitor just like you can change phone companies without losing your phone number.

    Basically, if the US Federal government cannot discipline monopolies by breaking them up directly, they should break up the moats and walled gardens the monopolies built to keep customers locked in to maintain their monopolies. See Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.

  • Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I'm gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla's income is from Google.

    • The actual numbers are $510MM/y from Google out of $593MM/y total revenue. So 86% if my math is correct. It's bonkers how dependent on a single deal they are.

      • Are they dependent?

        All I see is Google throwing a fuck tonne of money at them, and Mozilla spaffing it on pointless crap. They could probably raise more if Google went away, but they could also reduce spend significantly if they didn't have stupid money get thrown at them.

        Its like giving your kids $100 a day. Sure they could blow it on pay to win games, but what would happen if you reduced it to $10 a day? Probably nothing of note, just less spending on crap.

    • Um, it's actually 114% of Mozilla's total income.

  • I sincerely hope that is what's going to happen and Mozilla gets severely fucked over for how they have been running their shit. Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around. Hint: You're not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing "AI" bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can't compete with google there, they can always outspend you.

    As a Linux user, such a break would also be very timely, now that we have survived the painful surgeries of systemd and wayland. Those problems are mostly fixed, so we need another dysfunctional troublemaker - Firefox it is!

    But seriously: The official story is always that google gives Mozilla the money to be the default search engine. But really, they don't need to care. Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don't have a browser monopoly. For similar reasons, google used to employed 10000s of people who were doing very much non-essential stuff that is entirely irrelevant for their business. They could have fired them all long ago, and massively increased their profitability. But those would have looked obscene and raises regulators' attention. So just hiring a bunch of expensive engineers who build google chat 23.0 and whatever makes them appear more like a "normal" company.

    • We completely agree, Mozilla should not be run like it is i.e. a Tech Startup and should allow donations to Firefox directly.

      It should become a worker owned co-op as that would make a lot of things better in the long run.

      It's been clear for a while now, their current way of operating just isn't going to work and hasn't been, especially since they're adding rubbish no-one wants or needs e.g. the private adverts thing.

    • Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around.

      Or just run them into bankruptcy and dissolve the enterprise.

      Hint: You’re not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing “AI” bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can’t compete with google there, they can always outspend you.

      That's sort of the root problem of a monopoly. There's nothing you can practically do to break their hold. They have to fuck up so hard that they lose a significant chunk of their patrons. And in a Walled Garden of an online ecosystem, that's very hard to do.

      In a better world, the sanction on Google as "monopoly" would incur an antitrust ruling that breaks them up into multiple smaller firms. This is also what should have happened to Microsoft back in the 90s. Instead, what we're seeing is a wrist-slap that mostly hurts Google's partners, rather than their shareholders.

      Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don’t have a browser monopoly.

      Edge provides them enough cover for that. And Mozilla's refusal to adopt the ManifestV3 threatens Google's advertising revenues with a browser that continues to support ad blockers.

      So now its time for Mozilla to die.

  • Revenue of Mozilla Corporation. Not Mozilla Foundation.

327 comments