The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
Not likely. Mozilla had $1,321,539,000 in total assets – roughly half a billion dollars of which was in “cash and cash equivalents” – in their last (2022) audited financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
Y’know, you’re right & that’s wild. I guess I should have known, but didn’t assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org