Shame on Mozilla

by Adam Thierer on February 10, 2009 · Comments

Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has an appropriately sharp-tongued response to the Mozilla Foundation’s troubling move to become a cheerleader for the European Commission’s ongoing antitrust efforts against Microsoft. Apparently Mozilla will assist the EC’s investigation “by offering expertise about the browser market.”

Paul focuses on what’s wrong with this in both a micro and macro sense. He rightly points out that the potential remedies here do not bode well for the future of this sector, since regulatory tinkering with high-tech product standards is bound to end badly and create a terrible precedent for future interventions. “It’s hard to find a rational argument in favor of mandatory standards enforcement,”  Paul says. “It would be punitive and unhelpful to the advancement of the web.” Moreover, Paul notes that things have never looked better on the browser front:

Claims that Microsoft’s monopoly status has eliminated competition in the browser market sound hollow in the face of the profoundly vibrant browser market that exists today. The record-setting launch of Firefox 3 added up to over 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone. Firefox’s global market share continues to climb every month and the browser has grabbed almost 30 percent of the European market.

And let’s not forget about those two little companies called Google and Apple who have competing products in the field! They’re making serious inroads in the browser wars. Moreover, Microsoft is struggling to hold on to whatever “dominance” they have left in their core market: OS. As Paul concludes:

To the observant tech enthusiast, all signs seem to indicate that Microsoft’s monopoly is on its way out. The Redmond giant is in no danger of annihilation, but it’s definitely not positioned to dictate terms to the rest of the industry anymore.

But what is perhaps most shocking about Mozilla’s call for intervention is the way that Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker minimizes the importance of not just Firefox, but the entire open source movement, when justifying EC intervention in this marketplace.

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Comments Posted in: Antitrust & Competition Policy

Media Metrics: The Report

by Adam Thierer on July 15, 2008 · Comments

MM front cover Faithful readers will recall that, several months ago, I penned a 7-part “Media Metrics” series that took a hard look at the health of the media marketplace. Today, the Progress & Freedom Foundation is releasing a greatly expanded version of these essays that I have put together with my PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen. In this 100-page special report, “Media Metrics: The True State of the Modern Media Marketplace,” we begin by noting that heated debates about the state of the media marketplace continue to rage in Washington, and opinions seem to range from grim to outright apocalyptic. As we note on pg. 1:

Many people—including a large number of legislators and regulators—argue that America’s media marketplace is in a miserable state. Some claim that citizens lack choice in media outlets and that options are just as scarce as ever. Others believe that media “localism” is dead or that many groups or niches go underserved because of a lack of true “diversity” in media. Others argue that the market is hopelessly over-concentrated in the hands of a few evil media barons who are hell-bent on force-feeding us corporate propaganda. And still others say that the quality of news and entertainment in our society has deteriorated because of a combination of all of the above. It all sounds quite troubling, but is any of it true?

After taking an objective look at the true state of America’s media marketplace, we conclude that such pessimism is unwarranted. Indeed, a careful review of the facts reveals that—contrary to what those media critics suggest—we have more media choice, more media competition, and more media diversity than ever before. Indeed, to the extent there was ever a “golden age” of media in America, we are living in it today. The media sky has never been brighter and it is getting brighter with each passing year.
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Comments Posted in: Media Regulation