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Google Can Continue Paying for Firefox Search Deal, Judge Rules
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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This is about 2 different markets, both experiencing monoculture.. one is the browser, the other one is search.
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.
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.
Oh! you meant "paid engines", not that they are "better paid", sorry for the misunderstanding. And you say this is "the word on the streets" (small street, since kagi does not even show in the stats, and you need to pay to really test it out properly, right?). Ok, that puts things into perspective.
The fact that some people seem to be content with chatgpt as a search engine is testament of how big the gap in consumer requirements/demands for a search engine can be (and a reason why google is integrating AI already in their search).
There's many people who open the search just to go to websites they already know (they don't even use bookmarks!) or sometimes one just wanna know the most popular place for a particular topic.. or questions, issues or problems that have already been faced by many other humans before. LLMs and smaller search engines work perfectly for that since they will quickly give you the most mainstream and/or broadly agreed upon answers.. but if you want to find a specific version of a specific copy of a niche work in a specific language different than the original.. an image in as big of a resolution as possible that only appears in a specific page of a rare book.. then chances are that things start becoming harder and harder to find.
I've been using alternative search engines as my default in all my computers for many years too (I don't remember when, I think pre-covid). I even made a simple userscript for Qwant. And that's why I'm telling you that Google is still better. Granted, maybe I don't need to open Google every week, maybe not even every month, but what I'm telling you is that the times I give up and do, I often get a better outcome.
You forget that google ads boom happened in a world where IE6 and Firefox were the primary browsers. Google already had years of domination in the web advertising market before chrome, and their star product that helped them was Search. They don't really need chrome to allow them to do that, chrome is just a single piece in the bigger chessboard. Sure, I'm not saying it's not an important piece, but it's one that, if they must, they can afford to lose.
Also, I'd like to note that things like adblockers aren't a threat to Google's domination of the advertising market.. they are a threat to the web's advertising market in general. So it's not like Google will be less of a monopoly, but that the market for ads in websites would shrink. Those are 2 different things, Google can still hold monopoly over the market even if the market is smaller.
If you say this, then you can't put all Chromium browsers in the same "Google" bucket. MS Edge, for example, only sends data to MS, not to Google.. and most alternative Chromium browsers reject the tracking, and are also instrumental in the "push back" I mentioned earlier (I even linked to the post of one specific chromium variant that has been a big critic of google's "privacy sandbox"). I'd argue Mozilla might not even be the most influential, considering Apple's Safari does have more users than Firefox (15% vs only 3.7% from Firefox) and an entire OS ecosystem that they are quite good at locking people on. They have been refusing to implement those changes too.
Firefox sends data to Mozilla, but thanks to the resolution of this judge, they are encouraged to entice their users to keep sending every single thing they type in the search bar (even if you don't press enter) to Google as well. It's not like users escape Google's influence just by switching browsers, that's not how it works. If Google strikes a deal with Mozilla to extend their tracking / data sharing even further (if they aren't doing it already, which is entirely possible), would you also greenlight that too for the sake of Mozilla's finances?
qutebrowser/Gnome/KDE/(et al) browsers use Webkit, they don't handle all the maintenance by themselves, there are many projects that help and also companies, the bigger one being Apple. And like I said, Webkit and Blink (Chrome's engine) are more and more distantly different from each other.
This implies monoculture in search is HARDER to remove because it actually gives better result. You need to force your search to become worse by not using it just so that it can lower to the same lower quality as the rest.
The conclusion I get from this is that intervention in search is MORE important, because without any change you get a snowball effect that will create an unfair advantage over all the other competitors. And they can track data from everywhere, not just search, not just browser, not just maps, not just youtube... etc.
Either you split Google in many small pieces (something the judges don't wanna do... again, bad decision), or you just cut the head of the dragon who is benefiting the most from this aggregation of data: advertising and search.
In reality this isn't even targeted to protect Firefox. If they really wanted that they could have easily made it an exception JUST for Mozilla (or for open source browsers in general.. or for non-chromium browsers.. or pick whatever you see fair).
Instead they want a more free market. In fact, this might still hurt Mozilla, since the ruling is saying that a different deal needs to be struck that's non-exclusive and in different terms. It's perfectly possible that this still results in less money being offered to Mozilla, depending on the details.. or that it might be more beneficial to, say, Opera, since it's likely they were being paid less than Mozilla.
Also, on top of "non-exclusive" it also says "revenue-sharing", implying that the payment would be done based on how many people choose Google, and I expect the percentage of Firefox users that keep Google might be lower than other browsers. The previous exclusive deal (that, as I understand it, got Google to pay Mozilla a fixed fee to be the default) might have actually been better to keep if the judges wanted to ensure Mozilla Corporation's pockets are safe.
Google has the final say on what goes into Chromium. However, they don't have the final say on what each individual Chromium-based browser decides to do. Google definitely influences the decision, but they can't dictate it. This is made apparent in the responses of Chromium-based browsers to the changes that are perceived as counter-productive.
The one with that final say is the one in the final end of the chain producing the browser. The one who ultimately decides whether to update/rebase to the new version of chromium or not; or abandon chromium entirely and maybe use something else, like Webkit, that many other Linux browsers are using; or coordinate together to maintain a version with certain features removed; or maybe just simply abandon the project and contribute this way to the death of the Chromium ecosystem. Google has no say in who decides to raise their voice and publicly expose Google practices in blog posts that have been linked already in this thread.
Plus, the second most used browser is not Firefox.. it's Safari, another non-Chromium based browser independent of Chrome's current codebase, and that has also opposed to those changes. It's engine is used in products from many other companies independent from Google that are no small fries (Amazon, Sony Playstation, Nintendo, Valve, Samsung's Tizen, etc.) and it no longer shares code specific to Chrome, Google's influence over WebKit ended when they moved over to Blink.
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I gave examples of the opposite in an earlier comment. Though it's unclear what level of APIs you refer to here, specially given that you said "same deal with webkit" (which, again, is not under google). You might as well apply the same deal to gecko too.
This is a contradiction. If few browsers will do it, then my statement that it can happen is correct, and I included that just as one among a list of many other possible choices, including entirely killing their project and contributing to the death of Chromium's ecosystem, making a scene about it and further sway public opinion towards alternatives... in fact, another option could be to have their team move over to contribute to one of the existing Webkit alternatives, or fork one of those with whichever cosmetic changes their userbase likes. The point was that the final say on what those projects will do is a decision those projects can make, not Google.
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