Hopefully Google will keep sending half a billion a year to Mozilla (now with no strings attached). It was a good arrangement for everyone, especially for us. (Mozilla's not without controversy these days but hey, that's not on Google). I don't get why so many people are using fancy logic to argue, implicitly, that Firefox would be better with less funding. It won't be.
But it was very trashy of Apple to rent-seek off of their market power. $20 billion a year, to adopt a search engine that Apple insists, in court, they would have used anyway for free, is pure rent-seeking. Profiting off of the fact that Safari is preinstalled and has a high market-share floor (since other browsers have very limited competitive advantages on iPhone compared to Windows/Mac). Companies should be forced to compete for every dollar they earn.
But it was very trashy of Apple to rent-seek off of their market power. $20 billion a year, to adopt a search engine that Apple insists, in court, they would have used anyway for free, is pure rent-seeking. Profiting off of the fact that Safari is preinstalled and has a high market-share floor (since other browsers have very limited competitive advantages on iPhone compared to Windows/Mac). Companies should be forced to compete for every dollar they earn.