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 like electricity or water. We don’t need multiple, incompatible versions of it. We need one version, a standard, that web app makers can innovate on top of.

The point of the web–as a platform for apps, obviously, but also just for basic content consumption–is universal compatibility and consistency. Developing the same mobile app natively for Android and iOS is like web development was in the late 1990s, with different code bases for different platforms, a nightmare for developers and something that only benefits the owners of those platforms. Doing this for the web today is untenable and obviates the very point of this platform. The web rendering engine should be an open standard.

Chromium is open source and free, a de facto standard. But it’s not an open standard.

It could be.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that most people who want Mozilla to continue developing Gecko don’t really know or care if its “better” in any way than Chromium. All they know or care about is that it’s not Google. Today, Google controls this choke point on the web in a sort of de facto way because Google controls Chromium. I look at the situation with Chromium today and see something a bit more nuanced than that–other web browser makers, including Microsoft, contribute in meaningful ways to Chromium, for example–but whatever. Let’s go with Google as the (biggest) problem in this scenario. Google’s control of the web–however you measure these things–is clearly problematic.

So why not take Chromium away from Google?

The goals of the remedies that the judge will eventually impose on Google for violating U.S. antitrust laws with its online search engine are three-fold, he instructed prosecutors: They should prevent future violations, eradicate existing evils, and restore competition. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) responded to these requirements by stating that “denying Google the fruits of its statutory violations” would be difficult, in part because of its “ownership and control” of Chrome (and Android). So it has recommended that “Google divest Chrome … so that rivals [in search] may pursue distribution partnerships.” (And other things unrelated to this discussion.)

But what about Chromium? Forcing Google to divest Chrome but allowing it to keep Chromium doesn’t make any sense. Chromium is where Google’s abuses start. This is where it imposed Manifest v.3 on extension makers specifically to weaken ad blockers and trackers, benefitting its advertising business (and thus itself). Chromium is also where it tried to impose Privacy Sandbox on users for similar reasons, this time hypocritically positioning it as a privacy and personalization offering.

No, Chromium is not directly related to the abuses Google committed to maintain and expand its illegal search monopoly. But it is key to two of the products (Chrome and Android) that Google did use for those purposes. If the court intends to force Google to divest itself of Chrome, then Chromium must go too.

But not together. These are two separate offerings and they should be treated differently. If you think of Mozilla’s fate in a world in which Google cannot pay it as an unintended consequence, we might think of forcing Google to divest itself of Chromium similarly. Only this time, the consequences will be positive, and for everyone. Perhaps the positive side effects of that change can benefit Mozilla, too.

Chrome is clear-cut. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Yahoo have all expressed interest in acquiring Chrome, and we’ve seen valuation estimates between $20 billion and $50 billion for that product. Chromium is free and open source, but it should be an open standard. If only there were an organization we could trust with this important technology that’s used by most of the industry.

There is.

Why not give Chromium to Mozilla?

I know. But hold on a moment. Give this one some air. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes privacy, openness, and a “healthy Internet” in which “Big Tech is held accountable.” This organization was literally created, over 20 years ago, to “topple the browser monopoly.”

The court could give Mozilla the tools to try to do so again.

“Any remedy [in U.S. v. Google] must strengthen, rather than weaken, the independent alternatives that people rely on for privacy, innovation, and choice,” Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers said after testifying in the hearings. “We believe the court should ensure that small and independent browsers are not harmed in any final remedies. Without this, we risk trading one monopoly for another, and the vibrant, people-first web we’ve spent decades fighting for could begin to fade.”

If the Mozilla Foundation owned and controlled Chromium, the browser engine would remain open source. Google could continue using it as the basis for Chrome and Chrome OS, in fact, I’d argue that it would be forced to so since it won’t be allowed to just create a new, independent browser. Nothing would change for all the browser makers that already build on top of this foundation.

But what about Mozilla? Is there a way to ensure that Mozilla is not harmed by these remedies?

No. And there is an excellent case to be made that Mozilla should not exist if it can’t survive on its own. It’s been raking in those payments from Google for so long, it may have forgotten how to do so.

This isn’t necessarily the end for Mozilla, however. As noted above, I feel very strongly that Mozilla should not maintain its own web rendering engine and that it doing so is problematic for developers and users. It certainly isn’t enough of a differentiator to help it gain usage share. If we ignore the many people that Mozilla employs for this purpose–bear with me a moment here–the ideal outcome would be a single rendering engine, Chromium. But there is a version of this story in which Mozilla simply owns and controls both rendering engines and that it could then combine them in whatever ways over time, taking the best bits from either. And that there could be a long-term goal to arrive at that single standard.

More cynically, I would argue that if Chromium is not given to Mozilla, and Google stops (over) paying it for the default search choice, that it would then be forced to adopt Chromium regardless. After all, it could not afford to pay its engineers to keep improving Gecko, as Muhlheim testified. Ethically and for many other reasons, I’d rather avoid that outcome. But from a financial perspective, not having to maintain Gecko would be a relief. And it could enable Firefox, as a smaller business, to survive.

This would also be a best-case scenario for users, and while we can debate which party–competition or consumers–that antitrust should protect, there is no provision in any U.S. antitrust law to maintain a status quo for competitors while punishing lawbreakers. A Mozilla-owned Chromium would be everything that is good about Mozilla combined with everything that is good about Chromium. And it would allow the non-Apple world to move forward with a single web rendering engine standard. Let Apple expend the time, money, and effort to keep up with the rest of the world. They’re used to it.

I hate that this discussion rests on a terrible fact: Mozilla today is a failure, and Firefox is a business that could not exist in its current form if Google wasn’t paying to keep this supposed competitor alive. But if Mozilla could get over its misplaced idealism as it pertains to something very specific–a Gecko rendering engine that should no longer even exist today–and just apply it to the actual task at hand–an open web in which innovation, privacy and user choice can thrive–then there’s an outcome here that keeps Mozilla in the game, punishes Google accordingly, and resets this market so that any number of browser makers–and search engine providers–can compete on truly equal footing. May the best browser win, even if that browser is called Chrome.

It’s too easy to poke holes in this “plan,” and that fact makes it more fantasy than reality. I can’t address what happens to all the engineers who today work on Chromium but work for Google. (Though I would point out that whichever company ends up with Chrome would still contribute to Chromium.) And surely, someone has considered that Chromium is open source today, so Mozilla engineers could have–and should have–scoured its code base many times by now, looking for ways they could improve their own product. Do they do that? I have no idea. What might Mozilla even think of Chromium as a code base if they could just put aside their partisan positioning?

I don’t have answers. I have a rough idea. It’s possibly so far to the left of what a remedy could look like that it may just not be applicable. But I keep coming back to this idea that Chromium needs to be an open standard. And that Mozilla has good idea, has its collective heart in the right place, and is nonetheless in trouble. And that maybe, just maybe, the solution to these problems could intersect.

I know. Probably not.