Did Microsoft Make Google Pay Triple Rate To Mozilla?

Many took this as charity, and for the purpose of advancing the web.

I don't think that's accurate. What would be more accurate is that many media outlets have misrepresented various Googler's comments that what Google pays Mozilla advances Google's interest in the open web, and that that is one reason why Google would continue to funnel lots of money to Mozilla even though it has its own browser which competes directly with Firefox as a claim about "charity".

That claim has nothing to do with charity, its a statement that is about revenue -- largely ad revenue, but also revenue from Google's other services -- because the more happy people are with doing things on the web (whether new things or things they previously would use desktop apps or non-web technologies for) the bigger the market is for online advertising, web application hosting, and all kinds of other services Google provides for a price. And the more the web uses open standards to do that, the more Google's various services that rely on scraping, analyzing, and summarizing data from across the web can do.

There's also, of course, the direct search ad revenue that Google derives from use of their products in search, which is the most direct and visible reason they would pay Mozilla to be the default Firefox search provider. And of course that's important, too. But their strategic interest in making the web friendlier to promote their whole host of services (which is still mostly advertising, but not all of that advertising is search advertising) is why they are consistently willing to pay more to be the default search provider in Firefox than Microsoft, for whom promoting the open web isn't a strategic interest in the way it is for Google. Because Google sees a return beside the direct search revenue that Microsoft doesn't, because Google's long-term business interest are more closely aligned with Mozilla's ideological interests.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/TjbcPfUqutg/did-microsoft-make-google-pay-triple-rate-to-mozilla

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