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.”
I’m guessing that once Google is prohibited from providing incentives, the bottom will fall out of that particular market and those other search engines will likely pay less, if anything, for the privilege.
Would other search engines be able to “pay to be default”? My understanding is if this went through then browsers wouldn’t be able to take money from any search engine to be the default.
As I understand google is only prohibited from doing so because they are a monopoly and this would be abuse of their position, so smaller engines should be unaffected. For example, if I recall correctly, bing pays Vivaldi to be the default.
Thanks! So then the judgement is two fold. First to split chrome from google. Second to restrict google from paying to be the default search engine on any browser.