
Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath - ac29
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/12/05/mozilla-files-cross-complaint-against-yahoo-holdings-and-oath/
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jimnotgym
Yahoo is suing one of the internet's good guys. SAP is apologising for suing
it's customers (Diageo). Oracle, well they have been known to retain the odd
lawyer. When you go to court it should be a last resort. When you go to court
everyone loses. I think this kind of case is so damaging to Yahoo. I hope
Mozilla wins a huge sum

~~~
jorgec
Since where Mozilla is the good guy?. In fact, since Mozilla fired one of the
founders for political reason, Mozilla is turning from bad to worse: a) Is
breaking plugins just for the good of change. b) The browser is bloating more
and more for each new version. c) Is adding new features that never asked for.

Developers aren't happy, customers aren't happy and now, partners aren't
happy. Google is happy.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Mozilla has always been the good guy, but only sometimes for technical
reasons. They have been the good guy for their constant fight to keep the web
open. They are the only for profit company that I happily give the benefit of
the doubt.

~~~
Sylos
Well, and they're hardly "for-profit". The Mozilla Corporation technically is,
but the Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is
legally a Non-Profit, so is forced to invest their money into their specified
mission.

Therefore if the Corporation makes more money than they feel like investing,
they either have to put it aside for later investments or pay it out to the
Foundation, which is then legally forced to invest it.

The only real thing where they could shove money to the side is with paying
their workers too high wages.

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jlgaddis
Good. I hope they get that $1B from Verizon and that it goes towards making
the Internet even better. Knowing Mozilla's reputation, I'm confident that it
will.

~~~
gcp
Could also go bankrupt before the suit is decided.

( _cough_ Netscape _cough_ )

~~~
vanderZwan
I'm not sure why this is downvoted. Isn't this a realistic concern when it
comes to these types of lawsuits?

~~~
gcp
I mean there were 2 more years left in the deal IIRC? (2014-2019). 750M more
or less probably means quite a bit to Firefox development. If it gets killed
in the marketplace before the money ever shows up, getting it then might be a
bit late to save the browser landscape.

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TAForObvReasons
Relevant discussion from last year regarding Recode's interpretation of the
original contract:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050374)

The confusing part, as pointed out in the top comment in the post, is that the
contract as interpreted by Swisher would certainly be material enough to be
mentioned in Yahoo financials. However, the Yahoo filings at the time gave no
such indication of this obligation.

~~~
jlgaddis
Related discussion here about the contract termination 20 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15711002)

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ericand
Quite a situation. Mozilla has basically one paying "customer" and it can only
be one of two search engines.

The concern here would be if they burn bridges with Yahoo, than they have less
negotiating leverage with Google.

I forget, is Yahoo search based on Bing, or is it the other way around, or is
that deal dead?

~~~
StudentStuff
Mozilla could go to DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ask, etc or a mix of search engines
varying by country, a bidding process isn't unheard of (Opera did this).

~~~
Kiro
Why would they go to DDG instead of directly to the source (Bing)?

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allenz
DDG has a stronger commitment to privacy. That said, DDG will almost certainly
be outbid by other companies, and DDG will probably face problems scaling to
that many users.

~~~
bad_user
It's not only the scaling as a technical problem, but also scaling their
Microsoft/Bing relationship.

DDG is effectively outsourcing the search infrastructure to Bing, which puts
it in a precarious position.

If DDG becomes the default in Firefox, will Microsoft accept the increased
traffic or exposure? Will they keep their current commitment to DDG?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Can you provide source of the claim that DDG search is 'outsourcing the search
infrastructure Bing'? This appears to be a regular claim, but as far as I
know, DDG buys search data from multiple parties, including Bing, Yandex, and
many others. They have their own web crawler as well.

~~~
bad_user
Because outside of Russia's Yandex that works well only in Russia and China's
Baidu that works well in China, there's no other alternative. That " _etc_ "
in your sentence is not an "et cetera".

Bing is the only game in town for Google alternatives.

Here's a sample of what can happen:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_duck...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/15/bing_microsoft_duckduckgo_outage/)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
According to the Wikipedia page at least, DDG claims to have 400 sources and
their own crawler. Etc definitely applies.

~~~
detaro
If you look at the info page by DDG cited in Wikipedia, it'S over 400 sources
for the "instant answers" section, not the normal search results, and the
phrasing is at least unclear if their own crawler contributes to the normal
search results.
[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

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moocowtruck
was there some detail around what they didn't live up to in terms of their
contract?

~~~
gruez
maybe this? [https://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-
deal-...](https://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-mozilla-
yahoo-payment)

~~~
simula67
> According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has
> the right to leave the partnership if — under its sole discretion and in a
> certain time period — it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it
> did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to
> pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million.

Wow. What a phenomenally bad deal that was for Yahoo and Marissa Mayer

~~~
rdtsc
Why would they go with that deal. How did anyone at Yahoo read that and said
"Great, let's do this".

Was it desperation - "If only we could put yahoo search in front of all those
firefox users, yahoo will prosper again". Sadly I do imagine someone saying
that. People who would disagree probably jumped ship a long time ago.

~~~
Brotkrumen
Pretty much a standard clause. Put it in your supplier contracts! You want to
protect your product from degrading by changes in your supply-chain.

Bankruptcy or a new owner of your supplier may change their product so
significantly that you want an immediate out without having to keep your side
of the obligations. The supplier just restates with that clause that they
won't change the product drastically and what that product is exactly is
specified in the rest of the contract.

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owly
Would love to see a browser ask which search engine to use at at first launch
and at every major version update. The list could be randomized as to not
favor any.

~~~
james-skemp
Am I crazy, or did Firefox or some other browser do this around a decade ago?
Maybe Opera or Avant Browser, back before money deals were made?

~~~
rezwrrd
Sounds familiar. Chromium (not Chrome) still asks on first use but IIRC
defaults to Google if you ignore it. IE (8, I think, whatever came with Win7)
offered an option at first run but I've never had the options page actually
load, so it defaults to Bing/MSN.

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yuhong
If you follow me on Twitter (@yuhong2), you probably have seen my recent
discussions with BrendanEich on Google, Mozilla, and the debt-based economy. I
even attempted a debt diagram. The government shutdown may hit this week,
making it a good time to discuss.

~~~
Sammi
I'm not on Twitter. You want to share some quotes?

~~~
yuhong
Just search for @yuhong2 @brendaneich and you will see most of them.

