Mozilla rejects DOJ's remedies in Google search antitrust trial
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Google Search has some unexpected defenders. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. The remedy phase of one of the antitrust cases against Google wrapped up last week, and the judge is expected to issue his decision by August on how the company must address its monopoly in search.

One option suggested by the Justice Department? Ban Google from paying browsers to make its search engine the default. But Mozilla, the developer of the independent Firefox browser, has opposed this remedy. Laura Chambers, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, says the move would be crippling for smaller browsers like theirs.

It is most of our money. It's around 80% of our revenue. And so it is our lifeblood really that enables us to do what we do. And here's where the money goes. The first is to keep Firefox running. There's a lot of work we do around ensuring that it's really fast, it's really compatible, and we're constantly innovating on our privacy experience for users so that they can have a fantastic experience of the web without sharing all of their data.

It is a lot of work to run a browser engine. In fact, there's only three left. Gecko, which Mozilla runs. There's Chromium, which Google runs. And then there's WebKit from Safari. There used to be a couple of others. Opera and Microsoft had them also. But over time, that cost of keeping those up meant that they moved away. The reason that we are still investing in Gecko, even though it's really expensive and we don't directly make any money out of it,

is it gives us a seat at the table as web standards are being shaped and formed. By investing in this browser engine, which is funded by our search revenues, we actually play a really large role and have done for 20 years of ensuring that the web stays really open, really accessible, safe, and private.

How do you reconcile what seems to be kind of a tension between wanting a competitive browser business but maybe contributing through, you know, this partnership with Google to the dominance of OneSearchGiant?

We care a lot about competition. I think competition is important for a healthy internet. We actually have tried quite a few times over the history of the browser to use a different default. So you may recall a period of time ago, we swapped to Yahoo. It wasn't a great user experience. Google search is by far the best experience. And so when we moved to Yahoo, people didn't have a good experience. They ended up leaving the browser.

And so what we have done is we have Google as our default, but we make it really easy for folks to choose other search engines. We promote it, we encourage it. But ultimately, you know, we need to make sure that to keep Firefox going, to keep Firefox as an alternative, we need to have users. Users need to have a solid experience to stay around. And at this moment, that only experience is Google. I wonder how much of that consumer preference do you think comes down to...

quality versus maybe what people are used to because Google has been so dominant. We ran the trial for a while, right? So there was an opportunity for people to come used to a new interface and it didn't really work. So it's hard to distill that, Megan. I think it's a good question. Is it habit? Is it quality? Most of the research I've seen to date is that it is really a quality. You know, there's

as you become a bigger search engine, obviously you have access to a lot of data and the honing of that. So I think that that's part of the challenge here. We wish we could wave a wand and for there to be a couple of other good search players out there that we could offer to our users. That would be an extraordinary outcome.

The pragmatic challenge is that folks like Apple have made it very clear that even if these remedies came through, they're not going to build a search engine. They don't think it's a good investment right now, given the way that AI is shaping behaviors.

So, if there was alternatives, that would be amazing. There aren't right now. And I think that it is not a given that others would go invest in this space, even if these remedies were to happen. And even if they did, it would take years to try and come up to speed.

There does seem to be some growing competition to Google search, and that is from AI. Apple actually presented some data at the trial showing Google search use dropped in its Safari browser for the first time. How big is the risk for Mozilla from AI chatbots?

So we think about this in a couple of different ways at Mozilla. One is with the browser. How do we think that interfaces will change? The second is, you know, in an agentic world, which is the bed everyone's making, that's where it looks like we're heading. What are going to be the user needs? You know, if we think about what our mission is around making the internet

a great place for people. In an agentic world, what's going to be great for users? What's going to be hard? How do you manage all those agents? How do you have trust and transparency? How do you ensure that your data is private? When it comes to that first piece around the browser, we're thinking about the architecture of the browser engine. We're thinking about the stack and we're building out some prototypes and solutions there to look at that.

We're also thinking about how can we use AI to make the browser better? So, for example, we do translations in the browser, which many browsers do, but we do them locally so that your data never actually leaves your device. And so we're thinking about how can we integrate these AI solutions, but do them in a way that is really using privacy enhancing technologies as well. We'll be right back.

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You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Laura Chambers, CEO of Mozilla. What are some alternative remedies you'd like to see to this kind of blanket ban on Google paying browsers like yours to be the default search engine?

So we are asking the court to create effectively a contractual search agreement carve out for the small and independent browsers. You know, the remedies as they stand right now actually risk just reshuffling power from one tech giant to another. And so this carve out that we're asking for would enable there to be real alternatives and real choice, not just more power to different big tech companies.

Zooming out a bit, what do you make of the ruling here in this Google antitrust case? Do you agree that Google has a monopoly in search? Well, if we go back to our earlier conversation, we were talking about the fact that there isn't really an alternative player. We tried. And so, you know, for the Department of Justice to bring a trial against it is a good thing, right? Like we need there to be good alternatives on the world.

I think that the thing that's tricky about search, particularly in this moment in time, is that it's not entirely clear that these remedies will fix it, right? So spinning out Chrome is one of the alternatives. Everyone that's pitching for it is a large technology company. If OpenAI acquires Chrome, does that really fix, you know, the power of big tech in the market? Not really. Are they doing it because they want to create a fantastic ecosystem

browser experience? Unlikely. Are they doing it because they want access to the data? Probably, right? And then when we look at these, the reduction in the search payouts that we're talking about here, these contractual payouts,

Will that really realistically shift, create more competition in search? Maybe, right? This is where we're hearing consistently from most players in the market and very strongly from Apple that they're just not going to do it. It's a huge expense and it would be an investment and a time as we were saying that AI is disrupting the way that people are searching. Why would you put a huge amount of time and effort into building a technology that's being disrupted?

Would it even be possible for a browser to not have a default search engine? Technically, yes. Financially, no. For small and independent browsers. That is, as I said, it's really the way that they monetize.

Now, you can also monetize through ads, right? And there are browsers out there that have big ad businesses. The challenge for us at Mozilla is we have incredibly high standards around privacy. We could have a much bigger ad business than we have right now, but we care about privacy. We have a set of very clear rules in place

that mean that we can have a high-performing ad business that is relevant, it's great for advertisers, and it's great for users. They get to see relevant ads, but it doesn't hurt user privacy. So that is the alternative. But to do that in a large way would mean not a great user experience on privacy, which is not something that we're willing to do. That's Laura Chambers, CEO of Mozilla. ♪

I mentioned that Apple presented some data about Google search use dipping in its Safari browser for the first time.

Behrends points out the iPhone maker has about 20 billion reasons to downplay Google's dominance in search. Like Mozilla, Apple benefits financially from its partnership with Google, but with dollar amounts that are magnitudes larger. In 2022, Apple's revenue from making Google the default search engine on Safari was about $20 billion,

Ironically, Google actually disputed Apple's claim that its search engine was in decline, even though it maybe could have helped the company in its antitrust case, but likely because the company's stock prices took a hit after Apple's testimony. Notably, Apple didn't make Google's large language model Gemini the default on its recent iPhones, instead making a deal with OpenAI to include ChatGPT as a native app.

Daniel Shin produced this episode. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM. In 2009, three days before Halloween, a grisly crime stunned the seaport town of Anacortes, Washington. Mark was known as the dog whisperer of Anacortes. They soon discovered a story tangled in obsession. Who was the hunter and who was the hunted?

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