So paying in order to prevent search engine competition is ok as long as you are rich enough that your payments become essential for those receiving them.
Per the ruling, Google will no longer be able to strike “exclusive contracts” with companies to default or preload its products, but it may continue to pay or compensate companies to prefer its services in non-exclusive revenue sharing deals.
So Firefox can’t force to use google, I guess similar to Windows having a browser selection instead of just forcing Internet Explorer or Edge.
Wait… that contradicts other parts of the article…
They are actually saying Google can’t pay to be the default, but they can strike deals to share revenue.
What does “prefer its services” mean? is Mozilla still able to set them as default even if they are not being paid for it?
If they use a selection window like you imply: would they be allowed to set a pre-selected “default” there? would it just affect the order/placement of the available options? a “preferred/recommended” underline? would Google be willing to pay the same amount for that kind of deal?
I feel this is very unclear, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s actually a perfectly valid punitive approach that effectively would fix the issue or just a slap in the wrist.
Similarly, it’s unclear whether this is really something that won’t affect Mozilla or not. “Revenue sharing” implies that they will get less money than they would otherwise when users don’t choose Google (which I bet would be a higher percentage than those who go with a chrome based browser, like say… Opera)
I understand “exclusive” to mean you can only use or set as search engine google. Essentially the default with the install can be google but Firefox can’t block users from setting another search engine as the new default
Oh, the way I understood “exclusive deal” was that the deal is exclusively with Google alone, not that Google is the only option for the user (which has never been the case, you were always able to change the default).
This would mean the new non-exclusive deal for revenue sharing implies Mozilla can have deals with other search engines or services (eg. Bing, ddg, etc) and get paid for featuring their search in the selection, joining the group of “recommended” options alongside Google. Google cant contractually tie Mozilla to exclusively recommend/prefer/set-as-default Google alone.
but again, depending on what is interpreted by “prefer” and whether the browsers are actually forced to not set a default (even when they are not getting paid for it) this can be an important change or no change at all.
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How do you know this? how are you calculating the damage? we are dealing with opportunities that are lost, opportunities with a value that can’t even be known/understood since they aren’t being explored. I’m not sure you can easily measure this arithmetically, or predict exactly what would be the counter-reaction to the alleged harm of acting upon it.
Sometimes it’s actually a good thing long term to let things burn down naturally and build something better with a stronger foundation.
Making exceptions for the powerful and justifying actions for the sake of maintaining the status Quo does not sound like a good strategy to me, personally.
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I am a Firefox user but I see a different reality.
Nearly 40% of Mozilla’s budget goes to management and administration costs. It is unclear how much actually goes into improving Firefox vs how much goes into surfing over whatever new trend eg. AI, VPN, VR, …
If Firefox is killed it is 100% the fault of Mozilla, not Google.
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its pretty basic ecosystem analysis and understanding around how monocultures cause massive issues
[…] massive harm that this legal case is literally about
This is about 2 different markets, both experiencing monoculture… one is the browser, the other one is search.
- For the browser, the judges ruled that they don’t want to do anything about it. I’m not happy about that.
- For the search, the judges rules that they will do something very small and vague. I’m not happy about that.
In my opinion, they should act to protect search which is the primary money-maker from Google, and if there’s any potential repercussions, then if anything this should be a motivation to act on browser market too! …and many of the other sectors where Google is unchallengued (eg. Android)
What it definitely should not be, is an excuse to not fix any of them.
Personally, I would push for one of them to be fixed, even if it’s on the detriment of the other… because in my experience, when things really get monocultural, is when alternatives start to be born. As things are right now, we are like a frog slowly boiling… people are contempt and nobody really sees an issue because the situation is not really as bad as it could be… Firefox exists and it works well (mostly), so most people don’t really go and try to start/contribute to other alternative projects.
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Better paid than Google?? Not really :P …the reason search moves more money than browsers is because it’s a much much more strategically influential market and lucrative for big corpos. Also… is 88.9% (as of 2025 Q2) considered “weak”? the next biggest is Bing (another big corpo) with a whooping 3.06% …
(btw, it’s funny that Cloudflare has explicitly added an option to remove Google from the graph just so you can even see the stats for the other search engines better… that’s how big the gap is)
And Google has more control there. they can get away with putting ads straight on their search results and nobody bats an eye, yet they would lose dominance in the browser market if they placed ads straight in Chrome’s UI (and I doubt they’d be able to get Chromium variants to conform, so don’t put all Chromium browsers on the same bucket).
Google Search essentially sets the stage for SEO. Google has much more freedom in that sector, they even can do things that go largely unnoticed, whereas for browser they quickly get pushback that eventually has been forcing them to backtrack/soften their attempts (did you hear about FLoC? the Topics API? First-Party Sets? SPARROW and TURTLEDOVE before that? or how about the original manifest v3 plan vs what we got?), they don’t have to sway a standards comittee when it comes to search, nor do they offer an open source implementation of their search engine that others can scrutinize and fork, with the possibility of controversial changes being removed by third party Chromium projects (and above parenthesis has examples of that).
I’ve seen the browser market shift at least 4 times in my lifetime… and yet the search engine business has been a stable “monoculture” for a long long time… before Google came about I’d argue search engines were more like portals or directories, not really the search-focused engines the way we understand today, so I’d argue Google was the first dedicated search engine, and it has been the leader of the market of dedicated search ever since.
I’ve been using firefox for ages and to me it feels just as good (if not better in some aspects) as Chrome. And I’ve also toyed around with things like qutebrowser and the default browsers of Gnome/KDE (WebKit != Blink), without seeing any problems. I’m keen to try out ladybird too once it comes out.
I’ve used other alternative search engines too, looking to get away from big corpos, and yet it feels a lot worse of an experience… in some situations I’ve ended up switching to Google for some searches and getting much better results almost straight away. Even with Searx proxying Google (and thus not really being alternative) I get worse results.
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On the other hand, there will never be another way if Mozilla doesn’t need the other way.
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That was the plan, all along.
Great news for Mozilla, terrible news for the future of the internet
what about google and reddit’s exclusivity deal?
