Prompted by recent US court rulings, Igalia's Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer chat about court cases worldwide that could radically change how the web ecosystem is funded.
Brian Kardell: Okay. Hi, I'm Brian Kardell. I'm a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And I'm Eric Meyer, also a developer advocate at Igalia. Thanks for joining us this week. We're going to talk about the coming adpocolypse.
Brian Kardell: Oh.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I know, right?
Brian Kardell: Full disclosure, Igalia works with almost every tech company or has worked with almost every tech company. We're not trying to advocate for one or not for another. We're just looking at the situation, right?
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Looking at the state of the landscape pretty much. Yeah. We've pretty much every company that we're likely to mention in this conversation, we've probably done contract work with or may currently be doing contract work with. And yeah, we're not here to say this company bad, that company good, etc.
Brian Kardell: Or in the very least, we work on all the products and great people that we work with at all of the companies too. Okay, let's get into it.
Eric Meyer: Longtime listeners will probably have a guess as to where this is going, but if you're here for the first time, Brian and I have talked over the years about funding for browsers and funding the web ecosystem. We've had guests to talk about that. And then a couple of weeks ago, a US district judge ruled that Google has a monopoly in two markets: general search services and general text advertising. And one possible remedy for that. And what a lot of people are forecasting is a relatively likely remedy is to prohibit Google paying browser makers for exclusive search placements, what are called default agreements. When you first install a browser, generally when it fires up and you want to search, it's using Google for that search because Google paid the browser maker some very large amount of money probably to make it the default. And if that were the remedy, and to be clear, if this happens, it's probably a few years down the road because antitrust cases notoriously take years and years. I mean, older listeners will remember when AT&T was ordered to be broken up by the government because it had a monopoly.
Brian Kardell: Very old listeners.
Eric Meyer: Well, okay. It took 11 years to get to that point from the time the suit was filed to the point where the breakup was finally ordered and enforced. We're four years into this process, I believe. I think this case kicked off in 2020 or so, so it might be a few more years before we get to that point. And it's entirely possible that there will be other remedies that will be sought or that Google will agree to in the meantime. But there's a really strong chance, certainly much stronger than there's ever been, that major amounts of money that are moved to browser makers will be prohibited. As a little bit of background, Mozilla, for example, according to the findings during the trial, got $400 million from Google in 2021 for a default placement of Google as the search engine in Firefox. And if such agreements are outlawed, then Mozilla will suffer a $400 million, let's say million $500 million funding cut.
Brian Kardell: You know what Mozilla's total operating budget is?
Eric Meyer: I do not.
Brian Kardell: It's very close to that number.
Eric Meyer: $400 million?
Brian Kardell: Because that has been at the inception, which we should talk about. We should rewind a little bit because the last time there was an antitrust in the United States, we talked about antitrust actions against Microsoft for being the default browser. It was in the process of that shakeup happening that led to the creation of Mozilla, the open source version of Netscape more or less. And they didn't have a funding model. Basically, they got an initial grant from some wealthy benefactor that kept them going for a while, but what is the plan for open source? How are we going to make this work? It sounds good, but who all is contributing and why are they contributing and all that kind of stuff. And at the same time, Google was up and coming search engine, they had this great idea and they saw this thing that the web needs search, really good search is how we would get around. It wouldn't be just following links from a telephone book kind of thing. We needed a search, really good one. They made a really good one, and they made a deal with Mozilla, pre 1.0, and they made a deal that funded all of Mozilla. It was millions and millions and millions of dollars to be the default search, and that drove traffic to Google, which was good for Google, and it paid for Mozilla, which was good for Mozilla. It was kind of the original bargain. Anyway.
Eric Meyer: The seeds of where we are as always in the past, and there's no way to predict how this is going to turn out, but the 400 million to Mozilla in 2021. So remedies, if let's say that the end result of this lawsuit is that Google is prohibited from paying browser vendors to be the default search engine. Browser vendors can choose that, but Google is prohibited from paying them. Let's say that happens in 2030, so maybe at that point, Mozilla doesn't get $500 million from Google or whatever their operating cost is at the time. They're not the only ones who are being paid. Apple, according to the findings of the court in I think 2023, Google paid them $20 billion to be the default search in iOS browsers and Mac OS browser, Safari for that matter on Mac OS.
Brian Kardell: Also LG, Motorola, Samsung.
Eric Meyer: Yes, they pay all those people as well. I don't know how much, I haven't found those numbers. I haven't read all the way through the entire 300-page decision at this point, but yeah, I mean Google pays a lot of different vendors to be the default search, and that was found, I mean, that was part of the reason why the judge, in the end, ruled that Google was a monopolist in two markets. I want to take just a second to step aside and say how both weird it is and also satisfying to my young cyber punkish self that US district judges are ruling on whether or not someone is a monopolist on general text advertising. There's just such a William Gibson statement, just so weird, this thing that we do, this web stuff and people type in words and they search for stuff and they get search services that are becoming matters of judicial law. It's a little bit of a, 'Oh, yeah. The stuff we do is actually super important as the ecosystem we work in is incredibly important and it matters a whole lot.' Anyway.
Brian Kardell: this is big news because it's in the US. It's not only in the US really, because I mean, we have similar things happening in Europe and the UK and Japan. There are so many antitrust cases hammering at all ends of this, right? I know we're talking about Google, it's really important, but it's not just Google. It's Google, it's Apple, it's Meta, it's ByteDance. I'm leaving somebody off and they're going to be offended. I don't mean to offend any trillionaires, sorry.
Eric Meyer: They can be very expensive to offend.
Brian Kardell: What's fascinating about that is it is very interconnected, and that plays into why some of these cases are very difficult, because that initial setup, what was good for Mozilla and good for Google, it's like, 'Well, sure, okay, that's fine. What's wrong with that?'
Eric Meyer: But what's wrong with it is that it grew into this, in many ways, a very monoculture ecosystem, but we talk about we need to have all these browser engines, and I know you and I have talked about this a lot, but we talk about we need to have X number of browser engines. But the concern that you and I have had, and I think you've felt more deeply for longer has been, 'Yeah, but it's all dependent on one source of funding, basically.' And that's sort of what's wrong with that initial setup.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: I mean, I don't think at first anyone was too concerned because it was, 'All right, well, a search engine and a browser are working together and it's a virtuous feedback loop,' is probably what it seemed like at the time. And that's the interesting thing about these sorts of situations. The responses to changes in the market can seem like, 'Oh yeah, that's a really good deal for everybody. And then 10, 15, 20 years later, you realize, 'Okay, that was a good deal for everybody at the time. Unfortunately, it has now grown and twisted in such a way that it's not a good deal for everybody. It's a good deal for a few people, and it's increasingly a bad deal for everyone else.' We potentially face a real reckoning here. Let's say that again, I'm coming back to, let's say that the remedy is Google's not allowed to pay for exclusive placement anymore. Maybe they're allowed to pay for placement, but they can't pay for exclusive placement. And let's say that that's constructed in such a way that means that Google ends up not being the search engine that a lot of people choose. During the trial, people estimated that if Google just were prohibited from paying Apple, if they did not have that default deal with Apple and all Apple users were defaulted to some other engine, your Bing, DuckDuckGo.
Brian Kardell: I'm using Bing because there's a statement from one of the people from Apple that there isn't enough money to make them use being as the default.
Eric Meyer: Whatever, but during the trial, it was estimated that if just that deal were broken, Google would lose about 65% of its revenue. Wow, that's painful.
Brian Kardell: Wow. I've not seen that statistic. That's shocking to me.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I assume that's from iOS users. It's from basically iPhone users would be my guess. Yes. There are many people who use Mac OS. I'm one of them. You're another. But yeah, I would assume that that's a lot of it is the mobile search.
Brian Kardell: That's probably just US-based. That would make more sense because the US based market is wealthy and more iPhone than the rest of the world.
Eric Meyer: Fair enough. That could well be US-based since this is a US district judge who's talking, but even if it's 50% or 30% or something like that, that's a huge hit. And this is not me crying tears over, 'Oh, Google will be doomed.' A 30% hit would mean a lot of layoffs. It would be the workers who would suffer. Google itself would continue, but in that realm, so would workers at other places like Mozilla quite possibly, potentially at Apple?
Brian Kardell: Well, I mean where would Mozilla get funding to carry on?
Eric Meyer: Exactly.
Brian Kardell: I think it has a little bit of savings.
Eric Meyer: How long would that last? Unless they've managed to build up a multi-billion dollar war chest that is earning them enough interest that they could spend that out for a decade. But even that's still-
Brian Kardell: Even there, it leaves them in a very precarious position of how to spend that money, right?
Eric Meyer: Exactly.
Brian Kardell: They've been in this position for a long time. This has been, since the beginning, this has been the case. This is not a new thing. Mozilla has known forever that all its eggs are in this basket. They have tried a number of times over the years to find additional revenue streams. I don't know if you recall, but back in the early phone days, there was the boot to Gecko idea. They were going to make something that was, I think it was even before Android came along, but it was very much like Android. It's like open source operating system that was all integrated with the browser and they were going to have deals with... There were a few that are based on that. And then Mozilla eventually was like, 'This is losing money. It's not getting us anywhere. We need to tighten the budget and refocus our efforts.' But there was that, that was going to be on phones. There were Firefox phones, but what else? I don't know. There were several other attempts at how are we going to make our money that isn't this. Now they're working on maybe becoming an ad network. I think there's experiments with AI, they're doing experiments with AI and it's like, 'How much do you spend on that?' Also, they have money into basically activism and lobbying around internet causes. And yeah, those are good things to do, but also who's paying for the browser? How are we paying for the browser?
Eric Meyer: Yeah. And if you're operating costs are half a billion dollars, let's say 400 million a few years ago, but we'll round it to half a billion dollars per year, where's that going to come from?
Brian Kardell: Or if you don't get it, what do you take from? That was the point I was making, right?
Eric Meyer: Okay.
Brian Kardell: Let's say that all the spigot is cut off and well Bing could probably could give them an offer and it wouldn't be subject because Bing is not really not a monopoly in the same way or I don't know, maybe DuckDuckGo or whatever. They could get some money from a default deal. They could send a lot of traffic their way, but let's say that that deal is more like 50 million or it's like, for whatever reason, I'm not saying it would have to be necessarily, I'm just saying for whatever reason, let's say it's much, much smaller.
Eric Meyer: Even 250 million.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Bing is like, here's a quarter of a billion dollars. That's still a 50% cut, more or less mean depending on what they do. And so yeah, how are they going to?
Brian Kardell: How do you make ends meet? What aren't you going to do?
Eric Meyer: Right, exactly.
Brian Kardell: Am I going to get rid of the activism? Are you going to get rid of the things you're hoping will replace your revenue stream? Are you going to focus on the browser? And the trouble with focusing on the browser is, well, it doesn't have a revenue model other than search. Right?
Eric Meyer: Right. Yeah, I would not know how to square that circle, and I don't know where all their money goes.
Brian Kardell: Probably too big amount of it goes to executives. I can tell you that.
Eric Meyer: Well, yeah, probably that tends to be how things work, at least in the US and many other places as well. But anyway, we're not actually here to try to solve Mozilla's budgetary situation because it's kind of at a higher level than that. It's the, okay, if this massive spigot of money gets closed, like over at Apple. Apple got paid $20 billion, with a B, by Google. Now to Apple, it's maybe a little bit more than couch cushion change, but it's not.
Brian Kardell: It's a fifth of their profit.
Eric Meyer: All right, so that's pretty good. But they also have, what, $3 trillion in assets or savings or whatever.
Brian Kardell: Probably.
Eric Meyer: If the 20 billion got shut off, it would be a dent in their profit margin, but it would not mean that they would necessarily have to cut the WebKit team in half. They could choose to devote more of their own money to that than maybe they do now.
Brian Kardell: But right now it's an easy calculation, right?
Eric Meyer: The question is would they?
Brian Kardell: Right.
Eric Meyer: The question is if it's like, 'Well, this team used to make us 20 billion a year, and now in the immediate aftermath of such a remedy, it's making us $0 per year.'
Brian Kardell: We started this web ecosystem health thing back in 2020 or 2021, something like that. I can't remember. It might even have been 2019. And we've talked about these things on the podcast, and I have on my blog, a number of people have said, 'Oh yeah, but those budgets aren't connected.' There's nothing in there that ties Apple is funding Safari and Google is funding a default search deal. Those two things are unrelated.
Eric Meyer: But at the same time.
Brian Kardell: Technically, sure, but right now it's an easy calculus. If 20 billion comes in and you're like, okay, here's whatever, 500 million or 200 million or whatever it costs them to have the Safari team, it's easy. Why even question it? But if you suddenly lose a fifth of your profits in one swoop, I mean, there's no way that we don't start scrutinizing and looking at, 'Okay, what?' That's not great for us. I mean, we need to make some changes because shareholders don't want us to lose a fifth of our profits. And in that world where there's lots of court things going around and it's kind of a pain in the butt, I could imagine Apple saying, 'You know what? Yeah, maybe it's not worth it.' Or maybe because also they're the only ones that don't compete on every operating system.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And that actually, you bring up something that actually made me think back to the Microsoft antitrust actions that you brought up earlier. I remember talking to somebody who I will not name, but they worked at Microsoft at the time, and I was talking with them about the default browser situation, not the default search situation, but the default browser situation, which is basically why Microsoft got sued because they were creating a browser monopoly and we were having a conversation about what their priorities internally were and all this sort of thing. And I don't want give any of the details as to how we got here, but I said, 'So, basically what you're telling me is that one of the market forces that companies respond to is litigation?' And not in the sense of, 'Oh my God, we can't afford this monetarily,' because Microsoft at the time had tons and tons of money just like Google and Apple do now, just like Microsoft does now, it's not that they couldn't afford it, even if the court at the time had said, 'You have to pay a billion dollars.' It'd be like, 'Okay, that's going to hurt, but we can afford it.' No, it was how much time it takes to prepare all the people in Microsoft who would have to prepare for testimony and have to show up in court and all that. That is the actual cost to giant mega-corporations of litigation is the work that has to be done to prepare for that and then to actually go through the legal process. Like I say, have to come to court and testify. And so you have to have spent tons of time on going through all of your emails to see if there's anything that touches on it, if there are any conversations you can recall that the lawyers need to know about, being coached by the lawyers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the things that happen and all of that is time that you are not spending on things that the business would like to do. That's the friction that acts as a market force and sometimes causes companies to say, 'Yeah, you know what? We're not at fault here necessarily, or we don't think we're at fault here. This isn't worth it.' Apple maybe says, 'This kind of has nothing to do with us, and yes, we lost $20 billion and that sucks. But if this keeps going, we get pulled in.' People at Apple were testified at this trial, and that took away time and energy from doing things for Apple, like technical things. Maybe eventually Apple says, 'You know what? If we just exit this entire space and we don't have to worry about this, we got our own legal problems. Thank you. We don't need to be dealing with somebody else's legal problems.' That's a risk. That's always a risk.
Brian Kardell: Obviously there's this question that is very important to us is what happens if the funding disappears? But there's other aspects of this that are also, I think, relatedly interesting to us as people who are interested in open source and the web and the internet and technology. All this is intricately woven because let's create this default deal. I mean, what's wrong with that? It just makes good business sense. It makes good business sense for both of them. And then it's like, 'Oh, well, we're paying for other browsers. Why are we paying for other browsers when we could make our own browser?' It's like, 'Okay, now you're on both ends of that.' And then it's like, 'Oh, we're paying to be a default on iOS. We could do that.' And I mean, I'm not saying that this is how it played out, because I know at the time you had, like I said, Mozilla also was trying to do this, right? Also was trying to, so they're all good technological decisions. They're all good business decisions, you know what I mean? None of them seem off, really, but we end up with Android. It doesn't come with a store, rather it can come with the store, but if you want the store, you have to sign a Google contract, which basically almost everyone does almost. And that contract says that your operating system has to have Google Chrome installed by default along with 11 other Google applications. Yeah. I mean, people can delete them, but the standard Android stock comes with all the Google stuff, which all the Google stuff points to more Google stuff. And all of this then is also, in part, the reason why we have this lawsuit is because all of this is how the search engine learns about you, and it learns about websites and it learns all this stuff, and it can then use it to both make search better, but also to give targeted advertising and is a very, very complex to unwind. You know what I mean?
Eric Meyer: Oh, yeah.
Brian Kardell: I said in, I don't know when I wrote the piece 'Web Rise', but when you finally see this, when you finally rewind, you see how interconnected everything is and how ultimately if you start pulling at these threads, what is going to come apart? As part of this, there are people talking about not just default search, but maybe Google gets broken up. Maybe you're not allowed to compete in this particular way. Maybe. And it's going to be very, very interesting to see, as we begin to pull these threads, what happens.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: This is a big part of the presentation that we did at W3C last year with Robin Berjon. And his thing about rewilding is dealing with this, right? Is that we, I mean, I don't think this is exactly how he meant it, but at the end of the day, it comes down to we have really kind hyper optimized a few things at the end of the day and then built everything on that. And it's like that XKCD comic where it's this whole big infrastructure held up by this one little block kind of.
Eric Meyer: Right? And in this case, it's a whole big infrastructure that's held up by Google default search deals in a lot of ways. I mean, the commentary that I've seen, and I'm neither lawyer nor seer, but the commentary I have seen has said that probably not break up Google, but of course that depends on if the ruling were made today. It doesn't account for what Google may or may not do to potentially annoy a ruling judge over the next few years or to make the ruling judge happy. Who knows? That's always a possibility.
Brian Kardell: It will be appealed, whatever it is, anyway.
Eric Meyer: Oh, yeah.
Brian Kardell: The original ruling was also to break up Microsoft.
Eric Meyer: Yes. And it was appealed.
Brian Kardell: But we didn't break up Microsoft.
Eric Meyer: No, no, we didn't.
Brian Kardell: And also Microsoft is the default browser on Windows operating system.
Eric Meyer: Yes. Well, what are you going to do? Apparently not what you said you were going to do, but yeah, there have been other speculations that it could be that eventually the ruling is that Google's allowed to pay for default search deals, but every browser has to offer a search engine choice screen, right? When you first launch a browser, it can't just offer you. Browsers now, I use Firefox and I can always change my default search engine, and I actually have, I use DuckDuckGo, but I also, when I click on a little search icon in my search field, it will let me search a specific search engine or even source just this one time. I just clicked on it and on my little magnifying glass icon in the search field, and right underneath it says DuckDuckGo search, and then this time search with, and there's Google, Amazon, Bing, eBay, and Wikipedia are the choices that I have. I could this time click on the Wikipedia symbol type in my search term, and just this one time it will only search Wikipedia, and then the next time if I don't pick, it'll just go to my default, which as I say in this case is DuckDuckGo.
Brian Kardell: Which browser are you?
Eric Meyer: On Firefox. But when I first installed it, my default was Google. I had to go change it. Wolvik has something similar in that you can pick what you want your default search engine to be. Most browsers do, I think almost every browser, well, I don't know about mobile browsers, but every desktop browser I've ever interacted with lets you in some way fiddle with who's going to be my default search engine. And so rather than firing up the browser with, and there's just all searches go to one place, and if you want to dig around in the preferences to change that, you can, one possible remedy is the first time you launch a browser, like a pop-up screen comes up that says you need to pick which search engine you want to use as your default, and you cannot go any further until you do. That's a possible remedy.
Brian Kardell: That was part of the remedy in the Microsoft case. I think there is an issue with that that I've never heard an answer that I'm really satisfied with, which is then who really decides what's in there? So for Wolvik, for example, we decide. We give you, I mean, you can pick whatever you want, you can add one, but in the choice screen where we make it nice and easy for you to add some, we just have some market leaders that are in there. We just chose some. But it does mean that whoever is making that choice screen has some ability to exclude or include people. You know what I mean? I don't know, could you get in a situation where it's like we're paying to be in the center, you know what I mean?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: The place where eyeballs go the most, or there's all these different things that go like, we want to pay to be included, whatever. But there's another aspect of this as well, when it comes to what do you want to be your default browser? What do you want to be your default search? Which is I think that there are maybe some important differences, and I'm not sure that currently consumers have a great way to know what they are. There is a difference between Chrome and other Chromium browsers. There are differences, and I don't know how a regular consumer knows that some are better or worse on different axis, whatever you care about. Yeah. I don't know. How do you become a competitor that gets into that mix?
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I mean, browsers are better or worse. So are search engines, apparently.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, that's what I mean, right?
Eric Meyer: Yeah. Yeah. Apparently Apple thinks that Bing is terrible. That's what Apple thinks. I actually did use Bing for a few years before I switched over to DuckDuckGo, but yeah. How is a user, like you say, how is a user going to know if they're given this? You just installed a browser, you must pick a search engine. How do they know which one's any good? Do they have to be asked? Is the court going to say that they have to then ask, be re-asked in a month? Do you want to change your search engine or something like that? Will the court leave the door open for search engine companies to pay for placement on that choice screen presence or placement or both? Or will that also be prohibited? Will the court order that the various, whatever the list of search engines is, it has to be shown in a random order so that there isn't first mover advantage and there's-
Brian Kardell: Already medical advantage.
Eric Meyer: Medical advantage, and there's already a first mover advantage regardless of how things are presented. As long as Google is on there, it's literally the verb that we use for searching online, right? Because it's sort of the default verb, like I need a Kleenex or I'm going to go Xerox something. I need to Google something. Somebody first installs a browser and they don't know a ton about all this stuff. They're going to be like, 'Oh, Google. That's what I call it when I search for things, I'm going to use that.'
Brian Kardell: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think this is interesting because there was a part of this, there was a study that was included in here that was from 2016 that was comparing when there was still a Windows phone, and they were saying that on Apple and Google, it's like 90 percent or something like that, or even more than that maybe of searches went to Google because they were the default. But on Windows devices, obviously it was not the default. Bing was the default, but 25%, or I could be messing that up, but this is in the right ballpark. 25% went to Google. That shows the power of the default because if you think that the thing that you're saying is true, which one would you turn to? I guess maybe your point is that they don't have the choice. If they were given the choice, they would probably choose to Google because it is the verb.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, they have had 20 some years, they've had an entire generation basically to cement themselves in the zeitgeist, as it were, in the cultural mindset of that's how you search for things and all these other things are for nerds or whatever. If people are even aware that they exist, a lot of people use Bing but don't realize they're using Bing because they don't really pay attention to it. It's just like, 'Oh, here's a search box. I'm going to type into it.' And they still call it Googling. And the reason that we're bringing this up, the reason we're talking about this, even though it might be years before any of this comes to any sort of a conclusion, any sort of a resolution is that let's say that that gets shut off. What are we going to do? What's the ecosystem going to do? Now is the time to think about that now that there's actually a sort of measurable chance of, 'Oh, like Mozilla might lose nearly its entire operating budget. Where are they going to get that money from?' Apple might take a 20% hit to its profits, its annual profits, and what is that going to cause and what are we going to do about it? And unfortunately, I don't think we have answers per se. We have had many proposals. We talked with Robin Berjon recently here on the podcast about things that maybe could be done to rewild the internet. Other people have done that kind of thinking. There've been many essays, proposals, arguments as to, 'Well, here's how we could do this so that we don't have to worry if somebody waves magic wand and Google suddenly disappears.' Or if a judge orders Google to stop giving money to everybody else, whatever causes a major disruption to that funding pipeline, what do we do? And there are proposals out there, but it's something that I think a lot of us, and even I fall into this category from time to time, just think I'm just going to worry about what's in front of me and the rest of it will play out however it plays out, and I will adapt to it when that time comes. But you could argue that's how we got to where we are now. And it's not a good long-term plan. A good long-term plan is to think about this to consider how could each of us, but also how could the community, the ecosystem, weather this sort of a shift? What could we do to make the entire system more robust? Which is absolutely necessary. And start talking about it. You don't even have to say when talking about it, 'Here's the solution.' It could be to say, 'I'm worried about this too,' because that conversation about, 'Hey, I'm worried about this. Hey, this is starting to look like a real possibility. What's going to happen?' That starts to create the momentum for proposals to be more seriously considered and vetted and worked on. I mean, we're overdue for this conversation, as you've been saying for years. I've been saying, a lot of people have been saying for years, we're overdue for this conversation. But now it's more relevant, it's more practical. It's more immediate.
Brian Kardell: You don't want to be worrying about it when the building's on fire. You want to worry about how do we prevent the fire in the first place?
Eric Meyer: Or if we can't prevent the fire, how do we suppress the fire?
Brian Kardell: Right? Yeah.
Eric Meyer: It's like don't worry about installing the sprinkler system when the fire has started. You install the sprinkler system well beforehand and the Halon system in your server room. You don't want to a sprinkler system in there, trust me. Yeah, that's what I would want to see come out of this. Just sort of in the mind of day-to-day workers on the web, we all participate in what is now a critical piece of global infrastructure. That sounds like it is arrogance, but it's really not. That is just the deal. The internet, the web, these are critical global infrastructure in pretty much the same way that sanitation and electricity are. Yes, electricity could still probably run. I don't even know if electricity could run without the internet and the web anymore. So much has been put on the web. It would be difficult. Yeah, this is important and it's becoming more important. It's more salient as some would say. And so we really need to be talking about this and by talking about it, hopefully we get to a culture shift. Doesn't even have to be a huge one, even a minor culture shift that says, 'Okay, this is where we're headed so that we don't have to worry about this again in the future.' Because let's say that whatever the remedy ends up being, it avoids shutting off the funding spigot for the most part, but still imposes remedies on Google, maybe the remedies that are imposed on Google lead to knock-on effects that lead to Google's income falling by so much that they decide they can't afford to fund default search anymore. They're going to approach it in other ways. And that could also be really bad for the web ecosystem. And even if not that, it maybe just kicks the can down the road half a decade or a decade or half a generation, and we end up in the same place. It would be much better to get ourselves to a place where it doesn't matter if there's one incredibly dominant search engine or other web service because the funding of the ecosystem, the health of the ecosystem is not dependent on that. That's really where we need to get.
Brian Kardell: There's two things that I would like to add to this before we wrap up. One is a thing that I learned in this that was new to me was that one of the people suing Google in this process, it is a long story here about how all this stuff, but one of the things was the army, the US Army. Would not have expected that. And it's because the US Army is volunteer and they advertise, they try to get you to join the army, and they claim that because of Google's monopoly that they ultimately overpaid and they want money back from Google, which I thought was really interesting. But the reason I bring that up is because it leads into this, which is that we keep talking about search, search, search, search, but search isn't the thing that brings in money, right? It's ads.
Eric Meyer: Okay, yes.
Brian Kardell: It's driving the traffic, it's bringing the ads. Search is just the way that we do it, right?
Eric Meyer: Right.
Brian Kardell: Maybe we'll get to a conversational interface, maybe, whatever. It could be things like that. Another thing that I learned in this is that in Google's contract with Apple, if you think about in your Mac OS, you have the spotlight. I don't know if you use that, but if you start typing in there, it'll show you some web results. Or if you talk to Siri, you have a conversational AI, like I said, and those things, when they're accounted for, Google said that they accounted for a significant drop in traffic when Apple introduced those things because those are things that they were no longer using Google search for. And so part of Apple's contract with Google is that they're not allowed to make those things better. That's actually part of the contract is that they're not allowed to greatly improve Spotlight or some of the things about the conversational assistant because it hurts Google's default search. They're kind of locked into don't to do those things. That's important, I think, because default search is the way that we get the eyeballs to the ads. But ultimately, at the end of the day, what is funding the internet today is ads, and it's funding it to the tune of so much money that Google is making wild profits, like wild profits and still able to pay everybody to be the default search. Do you know what I'm saying? There's wild, wild, wild money coming in, and most of it is going into investors' pockets. It's not actually funding the real stuff, but you think you don't pay for it, but you're paying for it. I mean, every time I watch a football game and I'm experiencing ads every five minutes, I am acutely aware of how much I'm paying for it. I would pay substantial money to not have that. In fact, I do. I buy Disney Plus and I buy Hulu and I buy Netflix. I buy all these things basically because I don't have ads. I don't want ads. I would rather just pay. And there are infinite options for us to pick other ways to just pay. And the thing about ads is that it lets us subsidize and pay with a way that isn't directly money. It's really just at the end of the day, a tax, the way that we're levying the tax is through this strange mechanism. Do you know what I mean?
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: What's fascinating to me is that Google, throughout this process, and Apple and journalists, like everybody who I've heard that's covered this has said, 'If you removed as a default, you just took away that deal. What do you think would ultimately change? People would still pick Google. Overwhelmingly people would still pick Google.'
Eric Meyer: Right.
Brian Kardell: Google has made that case. Apple has made the case that they would, there's no amount of money that Microsoft could pay them that would make them use Bing. If they have to have a default, they would choose Google anyway without the $20 billion annually. So what is funding? It is this strange thing that even if you took it away, it would still continue to work the way that it works, for a short time at least. And it's ultimately that stuff is somehow the levy, it's the grease that makes the wheel spin. And I just think there are so many ways that we can look at to do that. I don't want to just be here to pitch for like Igalia, but you can work with Igalia and fund the work that makes all this stuff tick. You can invest in an engine, fund some work for Servo, just join the Servo collective. Get sponsorships. Yeah. I mean, we need to figure out ways to get out of this, and there are lots of potential ways, but yeah, I think the way that it works now is that the people who are buying things are valuable enough that the crumbs that fall from the ads table are funding this. And maybe instead of crumbs, a lot of us who have the means could figure a way to pay it, but it would not cost much, right? I mean, I have this thing here that seems to suggest that roughly in 2024, Firefox has about 178 million users. If you said, okay, if half of them gave a dollar per year, that's like 89 million per year. It's not the half a billion dollars that they're making, which is for 450 million or whatever that they're making today. But all of that is funding all of Mozilla, which as we said, has a research arm and a lobbying arm, and they're doing things with AI. And if 50% of those gave a dollar a year, that would probably be a lot of money.
Eric Meyer: Right? Go a long way. Yeah, it would go a long way. $10 a year would probably do it. Yeah. Anyway. Yes. I mean there are a lot of ways that we could figure this out, but we need to talk about them.
Brian Kardell: We're not going to find the solution if we're not talking about it.
Brian Kardell
Eric Meyer