Google, Mozilla, and the Future of the Web (Premium)

With the remedy hearings in U.S. v. Google behind us, a thought occurred about Mozilla, the only troubling collateral damage in the case. Maybe there's a solution to the thorny problem of creating a remedy that prevents further abuses by Google while also protecting Mozilla and everything it stands for.

To be clear, this is unlikely. And two immediate issues come to mind. The remedies in Google's online search antitrust case have nothing to do with preserving an open Internet. Nor do they need to factor in the welfare of companies that benefit from Google's largess. Indeed, the proposed remedies specifically call on the court to block Google from paying companies--Apple, Mozilla, and Samsung, specifically--to make its search engine the default in their products.

For companies like Apple and Samsung, Google's payments are welcome billions pouring in every quarter that help make the rich even richer. But Mozilla is different. During testimony in the U.S. v. Google remedy hearings almost two weeks ago, Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said that 90 percent of his company's revenue comes from its Firefox web browser, while 85 percent of Firefox's revenues come from the Google partnership.

If the courts force Google to stop paying its partners, Apple and Samsung would be unhappy, but they'd be fine. But this remedy would put Mozilla "in a downward spiral," Muhlheim testified, triggering "significant cuts across the company" that would likely "put Firefox out of business."

Mozilla isn't like other independent web browser makers, and not just for historical reasons. Mozilla is the only non-platform maker to maintain its own web rendering engine, called Gecko. Most of the competition uses Chromium, the open source web browser, and its rendering engine, for their own products. (Apple is the only major exception there, which is pretty much par for the course with this company.)

I know some of you disagree with the following assertion, but Mozilla should not maintain its own web rendering engine. Doing so in the early 2000s was a competitive advantage because the web was evolving so quickly. And Google created Chrome--largely with ex-Mozilla engineers--in 2008 specifically because it needed a front-end it could control to ensure that its web apps ran as efficiently as possible. It was already heavily funding Mozilla at that point, but Google never trusted Microsoft and it certainly didn't trust this company to do the things it required. (According to StatCounter, IE had 65 percent usage share in January 2009, as far back as it goes. Firefox was at 28 percent, and all other browsers had negligible share. That was the market Google faced when it introduced Chrome.)

But that's history. Today, over 15 years later, maintaining an independent web rendering engine as a small company is a wrong-headed waste of resources because there is no innovation required or wanted at this level given how the web has matured since then. The rendering engine is...