The DOJ’s ongoing crusade against Google has reached previously unthinkable levels of unseriousness. As the trial against the search giant wrapped up last week, the government’s case against Google centered on agreements they made with a variety of tech companies to make them the default search engine. In charging the company with stifling competition, the DOJ is alleging that these agreements crowd out alternative search options that consumers would otherwise use. What they’re really doing, though, is putting the open internet we’ve come to use daily at risk.
I am no fan of Google myself—especially given their abysmal track record on privacy issues. But the government’s argument here is both weak and dangerous. For users who want a different search engine other than Google, it takes under 5 seconds to switch. This is true across all major web browsers.
History proves this point. Back in 2014, Mozilla rather infamously tried to separate itself from Google and accepted a five-year agreement with Yahoo to make them the default search engine for Firefox. It was a joke—few users wanted to keep using that and many quickly switched to Google because it was their preferred choice. Like it or not, Google got to where it is today by being better at search than the alternatives. If Google’s dominance truly stemmed from these default agreements rather than user preference, we'd see mass defections the moment people realized they had other options.
Or, at least that used to be the case. AI has begun to fundamentally reshape how people find information online, with platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok handling millions of inquiries daily. Don’t get me wrong, Google still processes enormous amounts of traditional searches and has rolled out its own AI system, but there nevertheless is a shift happening as we speak away from Google—without government intervention.
Yet, if this case against the search giant was successful, it could have a damaging impact to the broader internet ecosystem. In an interesting twist, Mozilla’s largest revenue source now comes from their search agreement with Google. As the last cross-platform browser that isn’t based on Google’s Chromium engine, Firefox is the last man standing as a “free agent.”
Popular alternatives like Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi all run on Chromium—essentially Chrome with the Google components stripped out, which is then provided open-source for other companies to develop and build their own offshoots on. When Google makes changes to Chromium—like the controversial Manifest V3 update that limits ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin—all Chromium-based browsers must adapt. Firefox, running on Mozilla’s independent engine, does not have to follow these changes.
Cracking down on Google’s deal with Mozilla could actually put an end to the company altogether, leaving users with a browser ecosystem dominated entirely by Google’s Chromium and Apple’s Safari. Mozilla has been very open about all this. Their CFO, Eric Muhlheim, went on the record as saying that the company could be doomed without the search deal. The irony is breathtaking: The DOJ’s crusade to promote competition could eliminate the most meaningful competition Google actually faces in the browser market.
The DOJ has managed to simultaneously invent a non-existent issue and propose a solution that would be deeply damaging to the free internet. They would be better off dropping the case entirely.
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