We've the news that Mozilla has dropped
One version of the announcement is here:
Mozilla has announced a new five-year deal to make Yahoo! its default search engine, ending a long-standing agreement with online goliath Google.
However, embarassingly for the two companies a surge in traffic led to Mozilla's announcement page crashing, shortly after the news was announced late on Thursday night.
The new partnership, announced in a blog post by Yahoo! chief executive Marissa Meyer, will result in a major win for Yahoo.
Mozilla Firefox users search the web more than 100 billion times each year. By comparison only 10pc of web searches are made through Yahoo!, which is powered by
Microsoft Bing.
So here's the basic background. In the US, as a court agreed last week, Google can display its results any darn way it wants to. This is a free speech issue and yes, corporations do have the right of free speech. Over here in Europe the situation is very different. The European Union insists that Google is the dominant search engine (which it is in many markets although not all. Where there was spirited local language competition, like in the Czech Republic, Google barely has a majority of search rather than anything approaching a dominant position). This near monopoly means that the EU should be allowed to specify, on pain of fines for non-compliance (and those fines can be as much as 10% of global turnover) how Google presents search results. We've thus got detailed negotiations going on about whether Google can present its own travel results, or hotel booking ideas and so on, in preference to those of other firms, alongside those of other firms or even whether it must privilege the results of other firms.
This brings us back to the prejudice I mention above. I am prejudiced towards the free speech view, that it's Google's property and that they can do what they darn well like. I would only countenance regulation where there was a technological or natural monopoly, something I don't believe exists here. That's not the way that much of the EU thinks (and by that I don't just mean the institution, but much of the populace as well). The general belief is that any dominant player must be controlled and guided to give others a chance.
But what this announcement does is allow us to see whether Google has a technological lock in or whether the dominance is simply because people prefer that engine.
Think of it this way. There's two (and this is being extreme just to show the logic) ways in which people choose a search engine. The first is that they just use whatever they're presented with. If Google turns up on the Mozilla screen then they'll just use Google. If they're at Yahoo and Bing is there then they'll use Bing. So, whoever owns that real estate of that first screen has a technological lock in.
To some extent this is the way that the companies themselves think. Google has been, reputedly, paying Mozilla $300 million a year for that privileged position. Yahoo is presumably paying some amount that Google wasn't willing to to take that position. Quite how much of that $300 million was really for search traffic and how much was simply to support a competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer we don't quite know. We might imagine that it's a combination of both to be honest.
The other model is that people use the search engine they like to use. After all, any one of them is only a change of URL away. In this model who owns that real estate is an irrelevance. This is certainly my own experience: even if I'm looking at something in Yahoo I'll search using Google. A home screen (as a result of an unfortunate language error) on one computer is set to Ask.com and I really never do search there. I prefer Google, it's not the real estate that convinces me.
But I am just one person and the companies themselves obviously ascribe some value to that home screen space.
All of which brings us back to that question of regulation. If it is the real estate that drives the traffic then there could be a case for some sort of regulation. There is a form of technological lock in there. But if the market share is simply because of consumer preference then there really isn't that argument for that regulation of the presentation of search results.
And that's what this switch by Mozilla, from Google to Yahoo(and thus Microsoft's Bing), will allow us to examine. Those 100 billion searches from Mozilla browsers. Now that the default will be Yahoo (Bing) instead of Google how much of that traffic is going to move from Google to Bing? How much will stay with Google as that's what consumers prefer and how much gets redirected because everyone just uses the default?
Once we see what happens there we've some actual evidence about how important that lock in is and thus a rational basis upon which to insist upon regulation: or, obviously, if the evidence runs the other way, reject it. Further, this is the first time in recent years that there has been such a switch: and thus this is the first time that we'll be able to gather such evidence. We might not get it publicly, that's true, but the EU would most certainly be able to, in a year or so, ask Google and Yahoo for the numbers of Mozilla based searches coming their way and how that has changed since the default did.
I of course hope that they do do this. For, whichever way that the evidence points I would far prefer that public policy were based upon actual evidence and not just upon who can lobby best in Brussels. Sadly I'm entirely unconvinced that that's the way the system works but one can always live in hope, eh?
