Tuesday’s opening remarks kick off most consequential antitrust case in years, testing limits of the tech giant’s power.
  • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
    42·
    1 year ago

    Hard to argue something isn’t an objectively huge advantage to your business if you’re spending $10b for it.

    My only fear in all of this is we may get monkey pawed - if Google stops paying for placement, Firefox loses 90% of its revenue, and the anti-trust case may further cement Chrome/Chromium monopoly.

    • TheYang@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 year ago

      Google would likely still bid, but lower, so that Firefox may change over for bing, and still get ~80% of what they got from google. Google has an interest to not make it cheap for microsoft, even if they don’t want to pay a dime themselves.

      • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
        242·
        1 year ago

        Or maybe Firefox should find a sustainable business model.

        I love and use Firefox the software, but their nonprofit is questionable, their leadership is scummy, and their business plan is nonexistent. They could, for example, start by accepting donations towards the development of the actual browser, which is the core product of Mozilla.

        • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
          4·
          1 year ago

          Donations are a drop on a hot stone, browser development doesn’t pay, and the only two other companies do it either because it supports their ad business, or because it’s a selling point for their hardware and yet another way to lock their users in.

          • Amju Wolf@pawb.social
            31·
            1 year ago

            They could sell premium features. Seek funding from governments - they have a lobbying nonprofit and instead of lobbying for open and we’ll funded web they (sometimes) lobby for questionable things.

            And I mean yeah, donations are a pain but there’s still plenty of healthy open source projects that run on donations (both monetary and of developer time). Or they could seek out corporate donations and develop features wanted by large companies (who would be probably interested in the privacy sell too), though it might be too late for that.

            Basically do something - anything. But no, they take Google’s money with no alternatives in case the faucet stops.

            Meanwhile the leadership lays off engineers and takes huge bonuses for it.

            • Aux@lemmy.world
              9·
              1 year ago

              Premium features? The internet will explode the moment Mozilla adds anything premium. People really hate paying for free stuff.