I'm really struggling to find a charitable way to interpret this post, especially in light of other recent Mozilla moves. Are they really arguing that Google's near monopoly is good for... Privacy? Users? The internet?
This really seems like a shameless shill post driven by the same management that thinks that laying off most of their browser developers is the right way forward for Firefox.
Their statement was pretty straightforwards, IMO. The argument is that Mozilla is one of the smaller, independent companies that Google competes with, and that the DoJ should be careful about not hurting said small, independent companies (namely Mozilla) in the process of their anti-trust action.
Google does not compete with Mozilla. Chrome is a loss leader that allows Google to ensure that their products have access to the views they need, and by paying Mozilla a critical share of their operating budget they ensure that the risk of an upstart to their loss leader is minimal.
Alternatively: making a browser means you can choose the default search engine, and this is valuable. Google pays Firefox ~$450M for this, for ~9% of desktop traffic. [1] Chrome is ~70% of desktop traffic [1] and so you could extrapolate it at ~$3.5B.
How exactly do they want to proceed then? The only way now not to hurt Mozilla is to stop the lawsuit completely. Any other action will hurt Mozilla because they are connected by an oxygen tube to the Google. And Mozilla got into this situation completely voluntarily and according to the plan.
They're not arguing that Google's monopoly is good, I think, but just to take note that that's currently also the only thing that pays for some resistance to the monopoly.
This really seems like a shameless shill post driven by the same management that thinks that laying off most of their browser developers is the right way forward for Firefox.