This being just a Mozilla github issuetracker and 80%+ of Mozillas income coming from Google with the contract up for renewal this year. We’ll have to wait and see how much Google want this.
The whole point of them propping up Mozilla is to be able to point to it and say “we’re not a monopoly, see there’s an unrestricted alternative and we actually support it”. The moment they attempt to control it they open themselves up to antitrust investigations.
Any corporation is going to constantly be pushing the limits of what they can legally get away with. It’s up to us to hold our representatives accountable to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Relying on “the people” to uphold consumer rights usually doesn’t make much ground. We’ve already lost so much we’ll never get back. People are just too busy dealing with their own lives to be concerned about it. This is how corporations get away with what they do. The public lets it happen. As sure as the sun rises every day, corporations like Google and Apple will continually extend their reach.
It think it was unusual the US government perused an anti-trust suit over the MS browser monopoly early 2000s. The climate is much more forgiving now. I’d be surprised if we ever see a lawsuit like that again, as deserving as it may be.
Google is paying to have a search monopoly in Firefox, they don’t support it. I don’t believe those motives from Google exist or that they would have any legal impact. It’s pure business and the only consideration they have is if they can afford to have Firefox users use a different search engine by default.
Google funds Mozilla to the tune of $450mus per year. That kind of money comes with strings. It seems likely that, some point in the relatively near future there will be a “we need to catch up with the cool kids” blog post after CoB on a Friday and the next point release of Firefox will have the WEI API implemented in it.
I see that, after people raised a whole bunch of issues with the proposal, there’s a new message on the Web Integrity API repository: “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to open an issue to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.” So the Google engineers’ response to people pointing out the defects of the proposal was to shut down people’s ability to raise issues with it. It’s a good little preview of how they intend to treat the web’s users.
The big G’s posting about it is merely a formality. They don’t actually have to listen. That they closed the bug tracker on that repo so quickly is not a surprise.
I’m confused. Is this an actual proposal by Google? It is it personal musings of an engineer who may work for them? Have they tasked an engineer with floating a trial balloon?
The engineers on the proposal are all google employees and the presentation is consistent with proposals made as if speaking for their employers. It’s not exactly common but it happens that proposals like this are made on the proposing employee’s account, as google is so unfathomably large that many employees may not have push access to Google repos. However, given that this is a rather large and controversial proposal, I’d wager that this was a political decision to not “taint” official Google repos with this, enabling them to say “well it’s not a proposal by Google the company we actually love our users :)”
Add comment