i don't mean to spend multiple days ragging on mozilla, but reading this:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/amicus_brief/
and it's hard for me to express how i both feel for them and do not love the idea of firefox revenue going to zero, but also can't help but laugh at how this is pure slapstick and they are the clown trying to beg the rakes to stop hitting them in the face.
ok in this RPG you are mozilla. the federal government pursues google for antitrust finally (this is good). the federal government zeroes in on exactly your funding mechanism as one of the major remedies it seeks (this is bad). you are in a pickle. you need to hedge, you need to diversify, you need to abandon ship. everyone who cares about you knows that, but what do you do?
do you:
- jump directly into the oncoming traffic of the market dominance strategy of that very same google, trying to compete on the sheer accumulated goodwill associated with your brand (which is evidently massively overestimated, internally) as "the good AI." Zigging while everyone else zigs. Late and dad cringe in a crowded market. But not only that, you take the bold strategy of specifically and directly alienating the only people that care about your flagship product or soul as an organization. You make a truly bizarre and hard to read amicus plea to the courts to save your soul: "we hate the monopoly power of google too, but this particular monopolistic behavior is paradoxically good for reasons that we won't explain except to say that google has been so successful in building the browser monopoly that we barely even exist. and by the way google is very good! and if we somehow make it out of this alive, they should keep paying us!!"
or....
- recognize that it's do or die, and you have a small but dedicated group of people that are very clear about their reasons for using your product being antagonism to the tech monopolists. you come out guns blazing and say to the courts "yeah that's right fuck Google. Their browser monopoly has put us in this position we absolutely hate where we are dependent on exactly the company that has crushed the life from our organization and keeps us alive as a corporate human shield to deflect accurate claims that they have swallowed the internet whole. The only way out is to cut them to ribbons, but since we doubt the court will have the courage to do that, we now need everyone who wants to see a free internet to put their money where their mouth is and fund us as we go to the mattresses to keep the internet alive. No AI bullshit, no bizarre doublespeak, pay up or we're dead." It's not unprecedented. Meredith is over there giving the finger to surveillance capital every day and ramping up the donation nagware for Signal users, which they gladly do, because Signal fucks. and Mozilla used to fuck.
