Following a 16-months investigation that was not a secret for anybody, it did not come unexpected that on 20 October the U.S. Department Of Justice - joined by 11 U.S. states - filed a civil lawsuit against Google "for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in general search services and search advertising in violation of the U.S. antitrust laws," a statement attributed to the U.S. Attorney General reads.
According to the statement, the Antitrust Division collected convincing evidence that Google "no longer competes only on the merits but instead uses its monopoly power – and billions in monopoly profits – to lock up key pathways to search on mobile phones, browsers, and next-generation devices, depriving rivals of distribution and scale" with the result that "no one can feasibly challenge Google’s dominance in search and search advertising".
This lack of competition harms users, advertisers, and small businesses in the form of fewer choices, reduced quality (including on metrics like privacy), higher advertising prices, and less innovation.
Google has promptly replied to the DOJ accusations through their public policy Twitter channel with a brief statement that "Today’s lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply flawed. People use Google because they choose to -- not because they're forced to or because they can't find alternatives".
What the general public may have missed in this news, however, is that the DOJ lawsuit against Google represents an existential threat to one of the very last independent players in a market that Google dominates: the Mozilla Foundation and, by extension, their Firefox browser.
To understand how this is possible, it is useful to remember the origins of the Mozilla Foundation.
Founded in 2003, the Mozilla Foundation is "a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet" (source: Mozilla) and was created in the late 90s by former Netscape employees to promote free software, universal access to the internet, interoperable technologies, and emphasize the values of privacy and openness. These values reflected the lessons learned in the aftermath of the First Browser War when Microsoft wiped their competitors off the internet browsers market by leveraging predatory strategies and market barriers to entry.
The Mozilla Foundation exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project, and it is a non-profit organization as that reflects the belief that pursuit of profit as primary goal will invariably drive choices that stifle competition and foster anti-competitive behavior. As Microsoft had used these strategies against Netscape, the Foundation wanted to make sure open and free alternative software could always be available on the market, to prevent similar events from happening again.
For this reason, the Mozilla Foundation created and released its web browser Firefox and the email client Thunderbird as free open-source software.
Being a non-profit organization, however, the Foundation requires funding to operate as all earnings are reinvested; since 2004, the Foundation had a deal with Google to make Google Search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site was also made the default home page of Firefox. (source: Wikipedia)
This agreement has been renewed several times and in 2014 approximately 90% of Mozilla's royalties revenue was derived from this single contract.
To diversify and avoid becoming dependent on a single sponsor, by the end of 2014 Mozilla signed a five-year partnership with Yahoo to make Yahoo Search the default search engine in North America, while other regions would remain covered by other partners (e.g. Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China). However, Mozilla called for early termination of this partnership after only three years and, by the end of 2017, switched back to Google as the default search engine.
The end of the decade has not been very successful for Mozilla: the Firefox browser has experienced a steady loss of users and market share and the Thunderbird mail client has been superseded, to the point of irrelevance, by the general shift to cloud mail services (such as Google Gmail and Microsoft Outlook). This was mostly due to a lack of development while the Foundation was burning resources by trying (and failing) to differentiate in other markets such as mobile phones and operating systems between 2013 and 2017.
To counter this trend, Mozilla has started developing new services centered on privacy: Firefox Monitor (which checks user details against known data breaches), Firefox Lockwise (a cloud password manager), and the Mozilla VPN. The potential revenues of these products however have been seriously impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic to the point of making the original plan not viable, which forced the company to scale down their efforts and lay off 25% of their employees in August 2020.
While this happened, the Mozilla Foundation has also signed another search deal with Google that secured funding until 2023. The extension of this agreement is crucial for Mozilla as more than 90% of their income - still today - is generated from relationships with search engines and Google is on top of the list; however, this also means that Mozilla's survival depends on this funding.
If anybody ever wondered why Google is so invested in supporting a no-profit organization that develops a web browser with less than 8% of market share in October 2020 (source: WindowsLatest), the answer is simple:
Google is the maker of Chrome, the browser used by almost 70% of all internet users, and therefore needs Firefox to survive in order to claim it has no monopoly in the market.
Google has been continuously supporting the Mozilla Foundation since 2004 and will not stop doing so, because Mozilla Firefox is the only alternative internet browser remaining that is not based on Chromium, the open-source project by Google that provides the functional framework for Chrome and all other internet browsers commonly used today. Opera switched to Chromium in 2013, and Microsoft Edge dismissed its proprietary EdgeHTML engine for good in January 2020.
In other words, all major internet browsers in use today are either Google Chrome or based on the Chromium project by Google, except Firefox. And Google is deliberately funding the only competitor still alive (Firefox) with the tiny veiled purpose of claiming there is competition in the market.
Because of this, the DOJ antitrust - albeit well-intentioned - represents an existential threat to the survival of the last alternative browser: if Google stopped funding the Foundation, Mozilla Firefox would lose nearly all its financial funding overnight, and would likely be forced to shut down.