This is the key point here. Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari) and MIcrosoft (Edge) funnel money from other ventures to their browser dev teams. For Apple and Microsoft it’s just a staple tool that each operating system needs but for Google it’s a platform that guides users towards their other services and ties them in, YouTube, Gmail, Drive, to name but a few.

In the current business model, there’s absolutely no competing with them long term. You’d have to either break them up or create some weird funding schemes driven by govs and users that don’t care (public good or some other utilitarian argument).

This where anti-trust kicks in, that you don't allow companies to leverage a monopoly/duopoly position in one market to destroy competition in another. Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.

The tricky bit here is that for most users the browser is "free" so there is no market to destroy.

You need to offer some value added services (like privacy, less ads) to be able to charge for the browser.

Problematic might be the delay in the process. Anti-trust cases can take decades until a final verdict is given.

> Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition...

You're thinking of predatory pricing, but he market price for a browser has been zero for a long time.

Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. That's competition at work. The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants.

If tomorrow Google decided to do something to Chrome, that isn't in the consumer's interest, immediately the opportunity arises for competitors to outdo them - with their own code even.

> ...or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.

Isn't that the point of most free products? I doubt there's an anti-trust case to be made there.

Oh really? Where's the price for advertising on the Google.com homepage?

Surely Google wouldn't allocate ad-space preferentially to their own products, right?

And surely they wouldn't bug me for five plus years about how the internet is faster with Chrome?

Nah, that would never happen ;)

>The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants

I don't think your definition of anti-trust is accurate. Protect consumers by creating a competitive market. To promote and protect competition because consumers and the economy as a whole benefits when we have more competition in the market.

> Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product.

This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.

These massive, unregulated companies can lose an enormous amount of money on products indefinitely, either choosing to sink cash into them quickly in order to follow (or drive) the market into rapid change that a company that is required to bring in revenue can't keep up with, or in a slower market just park the product at an adequate quality, and wait for the competition to stumble.

After the competition dies, then you can squeeze the customer for all they're worth.

> This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.

Lets not oversimplify things. "Product competition" and "google doing nothing wrong" do not need to be, and are not, synonymous. These attributes are separated by at least a decade though.

I'm pretty sure enough of us in this thread were using the web when chrome was emerging, it _did_ offer a compelling alternative to the pretty dire alternatives at the time whatever your platform, and all on it's own merrits. For such complex beasts it's hard to quantize into best, and browsers wax an wayne in terms of keeping up with web standards and performance expectations... never the less at the time, chrome was a breath of fresh air in the context of the very stale state of browser development.

At the time it really didn't matter what Google's motives were, browsers sucked and this was good competition... But in the context of a monopoly in browser share (which lets face it chrome has become)... Motive is very important.

I agree with you though, the parent comment is wrong that the competition is still alive, it's merely historic at this point.

The underlying theme is motives vs competition - in the right context (competition), ulterior motives are neutralized due to market forces. However once overcome, those true motives take over.

I've been a Firefox user through all these years and still am. I don't like Google. I can still admit that during a crucial phase, Chrome was the better browser. Nowadays I don't think it's much of a difference, but the ship has sailed.

I never said that "Google did nothing wrong". I'm saying that if Google were to do something wrong that users actually care about, that would open the opportunity for competition to gain traction by offering a better product - based on their own codebase even!

That situation is what limits Google's options and that's what differentiates it from an actual monopoly. If you have a monopoly, your users are forced to use your services, because nobody else is able to compete. Nothing forces me to use Google's browser.

If you're making an anti-trust case, it has to be solid. If you just don't like the situation or making some sort of moral case, that's a different story.

It's also worth noting that even though Microsoft didn't need Edge to succeed to nearly the degree Firefox has to in order to continue development, the competition from Chrome was so intense they gave up anyway. Fields where even subsidized megacorp projects can't stay above water are very tough places for mid-size nonprofits.

I think if you look at Chrome from Google's pov originally, the last thing they wanted was someone putting out a browser where the default search engine of whatever you typed into the address bar couldn't be changed to google. A competitor could attack google by owning the browser, perhaps what they thought microsoft would do.

They also didn't want a small company making a browser which some other company could pay to become the default search engine.

Or more accurately - developers create software for free and license it as Open Source because of social pressure within the development community. Large corporations say thank you very much and use it to make vast quantities of money without contributing back financially to the people who actually do the work. Anyone who points out that this is grossly counter productive if you want to build a sustainable ecosystem that doesn't depend on the unpaid labour of volunteers gets shouted down by free software cheerleaders who condescendingly stress that they mean "free as in speech rather than free as in beer," despite all Open Source licenses literally demanding that Open Source software can be distributed for free (as in beer).

It certainly sounds logical but we see no evidence of this. Software creation is the highest it's ever been and accelerating. Salaries are going up. Open Source is arguably one of the reasons we're where we're at. I'd argue anything that puts up a barrier or changes the incentives to open source might be the thing that killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

I don't currently get paid for all the open source work I do nor do I expect to be but if that expectation changed, if everyone expected to be compensated for their what at least starts out as their hobby, I'd guess the amount of people doing it drop drastically.

Of course it sucks if your project gets popular and you feel obligated to keep spending time on it but you can always walk away.

Otherwise my compensation is the feeling I get from helping. This is no different then volunteering. I don't go to the soup kitchen and demand a salary for helping out. I also feel compensated from everyone else's contributions. That companies like Apple (clang, llvm, swift, webkit), Google (android, chrome, angular, dart, flutter), Facebook (react, graphql), Microsoft (.net, vs code), etc...

They are paying me back by offering all of that. I'm sure you can name some rich company not contributing but I guess I really don't care.

> and license it as Open Source because of social pressure within the development community

I hope you are not implying that that is the main or even only reason to release free software.

> Anyone who [...]

IME people get shouted down for suggesting to "fix" free software by removing freedoms.

I'd actually say it's one of the primary motivations, but then I think that's the reason most people do most things. On the second point freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum and exercising ones freedoms almost always involves impinging on the freedoms of others. Therefore there is a constant negotiation going on that involves the balancing of freedoms of different individuals, not to mention the balancing of freedoms with other ethical goods that people value (like equality, happiness etc.) There is very little recognition in the fsf / open source world that adopting a maximalist approach to a specific set of freedoms - those that fit into the free software / open source ideology - necessarily impinges on other freedoms that many people also value - like the freedom to own and profit from one's labour without further enriching google et. al (Yes there are differences between the fsf and open source camps but they're largely of the peoples front of Judea / judean people's front variety.)

Free Software and Open Source software are not the same thing. Open Source was entirely conceived in order to subvert Free Software through making it even cheaper.

So "free software cheerleaders" are not trying to defend Open Source. If you don't want large corporations, or any corporations, ripping off your work, make it AGPL and sell them licenses.

As it is, most of this type of thing seems to be a complaint that the commons is crowding out the small businessman i.e. "There are too many public parks, and they're keeping people from visiting my nature resort."

Seems like a lot of open source is coming from big tech these days.

And OSS is more attractive to those companies in terms of not being vendor locked-in.

People who are annoyed that age of commercial smalltalks is over, or shilling for oracle, never understand this.

Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google wanted to be the search engine on its free software. You can give software away and make money in other ways. Plenty of software companies do it and it's a perfectly valid business model. Small company does not "lose", and $450M is not small

And a lot of this went for non-technical parts of the organisation, and technical talent got laid off.

Fucking suits.

Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google didn't want to be involved in an antitrust action. Conflict between Mozilla and Google is keyfabe; Mozilla is virtually a subsidiary of Google.

I understood that this deal is now expiring?

It's a contract for a few years. They'll probably re-up it, the question is for how much money.

According to this report, they already re-upped it

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/13/0012243/mozilla-ext...

Oh wow. So from a financial standpoint they're not in a radically different position to earlier years (assuming between 10-20% more in other revenues), in fact seems as if they have approx 100M$ more coming in as revenue in comparison to the previous year of comparison (2018) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

Then why in the name of space balls did they fire like 25% of their dev team?

Because they they already re-upped it, why spend more money when you already got the rewards? That is what happens when a company doesn't care about the product.

Because income is lower than expenses.

IMO there is one more factor in play: pricing inertia once “market prices” are set

ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today.

Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since.

I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)

Netscape tried it. GetRight tried it; darn, even winzip tried it but people just wont pay for it. On the other hand, once you start adding copy protection mechanisms that work, we all start whining.

Corollary law: once a good enough product is released in a consumer categoryfor free, nobody will ever want to pay for anything in that category again, even if they could easily afford it :)

Hence the success of SaaS and monthly fees.

Its almost as if one free thing in one category doesnt observe the same laws as another free thing in another category.