So the real question is whether there is something that Mozilla be doing to achieve the goals those two documents described that would be a better investment of money and that it's not already doing. Do you know of something offhand?
[Disclaimer: I work for the Mozilla Corporation, on Firefox, and was not involved in the decision to file this lawsuit in any way.]
I would much rather Mozilla be investing money in breaking the global Google monopoly than bothering with some regional peasantry like the carriers. Particularly with initiatives like AMP (and now AMP4Email), we are in a very serious place where one company is dictating the standards by which the Internet works... while simultaneously refusing to make them open standards with governance outside of Google.
Obviously, they're using their Search and Mail monopolies to push those formats, and speaking of search, we've been talking a lot about where our information comes from online and how accurate it is. A better Internet means we need to do better at that, and we need alternatives than a global centralized search engine operated by a corporation with a significant political agenda.
I agree that the AMP stuff is not great in all sorts of ways. Short of building a mail service or search engine, what things can Mozilla do here other than capture market share away from Chrome? This last is _definitely_ being invested in...
Note that I'm asking this seriously. If there are things we could be doing that are useful and effective and we aren't doing them, I'd like to know and see if I can poke people to fix that.
Looking back isn't super useful, I suppose, but I had hopes for a "third option" in the phone space, with Firefox OS. (I carry a Windows Mobile device currently, which is also a third option, but one with only about a year of security updates left.) As with most early development alternative OSes, there literally wasn't even a phone I could buy that worked on my carrier. PWAs seem to hold some promise to prevent app gap issues, Microsoft seems to be leaning hard on them to even potentially make their own mobile push viable again.
But in terms of outright litigation such as the headline, why not cover how Google mandates manufacturers include Chrome as the default web browser on Android, say, over Firefox, a better option that protects it's users better? (Particularly by tying that requirement to get the Play Store, this is one of the most flagrantly illegal business plays in our time.) The "new Microsoft" has become far worse than the old one.
In a more ethereal way, it'd be nice if it felt like Mozilla was pushing harder to lead the way on web standards too. It seems like everything new in web is coming from El Goog, and comes with strings attached (namely, heavily cloud service-dependent design). It's hard to really define this one, but I hope you get the gist.
This all being said, I am super happy with Mozilla's recent work to bring Firefox back to being the best browser, a status I'm not sure I felt it had since 4.0 or so, but one I feel it definitely has earned back.
As far as Google's anti-competitive practices, I know people have been looking at them. I am not a lawyer; it's unclear to me how easy it is to bring private suits about that sort of thing (as opposed to governments bringing antitrust suits).
Fully agreed on the web standards bit. Part of the problem there is simply manpower. Google is throwing a _lot_ of people at standards bodies... :(
This is an incorrect notion: There are hundreds and hundreds of gates at the ISP level. From a realistic standpoint, ISPs do not and cannot control information. They may be able to get involved in a limited geographic area, in some fashions, but they're already far more heavily regulated than the nearly free reign Google has, and it's far easier to circumvent their control.
Almost all information travels through and is monitored, filtered, and censored by Google. At multiple levels, including the browser, the operating system, email services, search/discovery, and more. And as Google moves into pushing companies to migrate their data about you to Google, you no longer even have the choice to look for alternatives. For example, RCS messaging is moving text messaging systems over to Google servers, and there's nothing you can do about it, because it's a carrier-level decision.
Google has recently bragged to advertisers it gets 70% of all credit and debit card transaction data in the US. Even if you don't do business with Google or use any Google services, everything ends up feeding back to them through one way or another.
Meanwhile, apart from areas which aren't very profitable to be an ISP, most people have at least some options for ISPs, even if they aren't good options, and most ISP conduct can either be opted out of or circumvented with ease.
If you are worried about censorship, privacy, and fairness on the Internet, and you're worried about ISPs, you're being sorely misled. And guess who's been paying for all the marketing about how bad the ISPs are? https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html
That is simply an incorrect statement. If the ISP decided to censor the data, you'd simply not be able to get to it at all. Google does not have that ability, no matter what. They cannot prevent me from accessing something.
Being concerned about ISPs, especially with NN being repealed, is not being misled at all. It's being prudent.
The point you may have missed here, is that an ISP can only stop you from getting some data through that particular ISP. They can't silence information because there are many ISPs, and even if you are somewhere where literally no consumers have an alternative ISP (this is unlikely), there's cell phones, which are different ISPs. And satellite Internet. (Oh, and businesses usually have more/different ISP options than consumers may in a given area as well.)
ISPs cannot silence people. If they could, you wouldn't hear everyone whining about net neutrality. But Google can render a site effectively nonexistent from the Internet, and most of your communications goes either to or from a Google server at some point, whether it's a website, an email, a text, or a phone call. Statistically, you likely also use a phone running Google software, use a web browser made by Google, and use Google as your primary email account, which potentially grants them access to all of the data in all of your other accounts. (That's before we add in that Google's now in the ISP game, and both your landline and mobile ISP could also be Google.)
In fact, the only way to convey a message and be confident Google can't intercept it or block it, is to drive to someone and tell them in person.
But who's fault is that really? If a local city council or county commissioners, decide to allow a single provider to control the territory (or selectively restrict competitors)[1], why do the people affected not exercise their voting power to allow more competition?
The abuse of public right-of-ways, franchise negotiations, and unreasonable permitting processes have much more of a negative impact to broadband expansion.
Fault is irrelevant to the falsity of the claim that broadband providers that have been covered by net neutrality cannot, with the repeal of those rules, effectively censor content because customers have a choice of many such providers.
Whoever's fault it is, the fact is that most customers do not have a choice of many providers.
So less than 50%, and qualified with a specific speed minimum which is... generous, to say the least. Your own source (which was what I was looking at when I asked you for a source) disagrees with your false statement.
This also doesn't account for a variety of other ways to get Internet, which I described above, such as mobile access.
Just a little less than 50% have less than two providers. Two is far short of "many".
> and qualified with a specific speed minimum which is...
...exactly the current regulatory minimum downstream speed of broadband (which is the domain to which net neutrality applied), and, per the current, anti-neutrality FCC, met by the majority of home wireline connections. [0]
Actually, it's worse than that. It sounds like the researchers looked at the FCC's census-tract numbers and multiplied each by the number of households in each census tract. That inherits a big error baked into the census-tract numbers.
In the FCC's numbers, if you have a census tract wherein one household has access to AT&T, one other household has access to Comcast, and none of the other households have any access to any ISP at all, that's a census tract with two providers. I suspect there aren't any census tracts where the situation is quite that extreme, but I suspect many "competitive" census tracts have at least some households that actually only have one option.
That said, at least census-tract aggregation is better than the zip-code level aggregation that preceded it...
The Foundation does not have shareholders. It does have a board that it presumably needs to justify their actions to. Those actions presumably need to align with https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ and https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ better than other uses of the same money to be justified.
So the real question is whether there is something that Mozilla be doing to achieve the goals those two documents described that would be a better investment of money and that it's not already doing. Do you know of something offhand?
[Disclaimer: I work for the Mozilla Corporation, on Firefox, and was not involved in the decision to file this lawsuit in any way.]