Mozilla’s Decision to Partner with Yahoo Examined in Google Antitrust Case

The CEO of Mozilla Foundation stated that their decision to change the default search engine in Firefox from Google to Yahoo was an unsuccessful move that negatively impacted the user experience.

CEO Mitchell Baker said Mozilla decided to move to Yahoo’s technology in 2014 after CEO Marissa Mayer took over and promised to “make a big contribution for us.”

“That bet failed,” Baker said in a videotaped interview from 2022 that was played Wednesday in defense of Google in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit. “Yahoo’s search experience for Firefox users was degraded.”

Both Google and the Justice Department have cited the Mozilla example — the only instance where a browser has changed its default search engine provider — to back up its arguments in the case. The Justice Department alleges that by paying up to $26 billion in 2021 to default on cellphones, computers and other devices, Google has unfairly stifled potential competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and DuckDuckGo. Google says users like its services and can switch easily if they want.

Yahoo agreed to pay Mozilla at least $375 million — more than Google’s offer of $276 million a year, Baker said. It also agreed to reduce the number of ads and provide less user tracking than Google, but over time Yahoo backed away and started showing more ads, he added.

Back to Google

“I felt strongly that Yahoo was not delivering the search experience we had agreed upon,” Baker said.

Mozilla returned to using Google in 2017, with a new deal in 2020, Baker said.

Baker also acknowledged that his salary is partially tied to Mozilla’s annual revenue. He said he made $2.5 million in 2020 and more the following year after Mozilla renewed its contract with Google.

Before Baker helped create Mozilla, he worked at Netscape Communications Corp., which developed the browser in the Justice Department’s antitrust battle against Microsoft.

The Firefox browser has a feature that allows users to easily switch between Yahoo, Google, Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo searches. Even so, Baker said, “the number of users using Firefox dropped significantly during the years when Yahoo was the default.”

The decline in Firefox users wasn’t necessarily due to the switch, Baker said, but it coincided with the search engine’s change.

“Our users made it clear that they search for, want and expect Google,” he said.

Firefox market share

At its peak, Baker said Firefox had about a 32 percent market share in the U.S. on desktop computers. The money Google paid Mozilla represented about 90 percent of the foundation’s 2012 and 2013 revenue, Baker said. He didn’t disclose how much Google pays the company today, but agreed the amount was “hundreds of millions of dollars a year” — more than Google paid Firefox when its market share was at its peak.

The company has struggled to compete for mobile users because Android phones and iPhones default to Chrome and Safari, he said.

“Just having an app in an app store is a very difficult way to compete with preloaded defaults,” Baker said. People have to “make an informed decision and put in a lot of work to get your product.”

Mozilla is currently testing how users react when some search queries are sent to Bing instead of Google, he said.

“When our contracts come up for renewal, historically we looked at the market to see what the options were,” he said. More “competition in the search market would help us”.