Mozilla has filed an objection against the recommendations made by the U.S. Department of Justice in the antitrust case where Google was deemed a monopoly in the search engine market. The recommendations mention a ban on all payments to browser developers for directing traffic to the search engine. According to Mozilla, if the court approves this proposal, it will strike a blow to independent browsers that rely on agreements with search engines. Instead of fostering competition in search, the decision will undermine competition among browsers and complicate the resistance against dominant corporations like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
Currently, there are three competitive engines: Chromium, Gecko, and Webkit. Given that Mozilla’s main source of funding is its agreement with the Google search engine, the ban on search payments would create conditions leading to the demise of the Gecko engine and the browsers based on it. The result could be a shift of the monopoly role from one major player to another (for example, from Google to Microsoft), suppressing independent competitors that drive innovation in browsers. If Mozilla ceases to exist, only the Chromium cross-platform browser engine will remain.
Source: opennet.ru
