It was a sloppy statement, but is broadly speaking, true. For overwhelming citations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (HN Search of posts from Matt Stoller's BIG Newsletter, which focuses on corporate monopolies and power in the US).
> The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago.
> Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years.
I think part of the Mozilla problem is that they are based in San Francisco which puts them in touch with people from Facebook and Google and OpenAI every frickin' day and they are just so seeped in the FOMO Dilemma [1] that they can't hear the objection to NFT and AI features that users, particularly Firefox users, hate. [2]
I'd really like to see Mozilla move anywhere but the bay area, whether that is Dublin or Denver. When you aren't hanging out with "big tech" people at lunch and after work and when you have to get in a frickin' airplane to meet with those people you might start to "think different" and get some empathy for users and produce a better product and be a viable business as opposed to another out-of-touch and unaccountable NGO.
[1] Clayton Christensen pointed out in The Innovator's Dilemma that companies like Kodak and Xerox die because they are focused on the needs of their current customers who could care less about the new shiny that can't satisfy their needs now but will be superior in say 15 years. Now we have The FOMO Dilemma which is best illustrated by Windows 8 which went in a bold direction (tabletization) that users were completely indifferent to: firms now introduce things that their existing customers hate because they read The Innovator's Dilemma and don't want to wind up like Xerox.
[2] we use Firefox because we hate that corporate garbage.
My two cents is Mozilla should be in a European tech hub, with some component of their funding coming from the EU, where the EU's belief in regulation and nation state efforts to protect humans exceeds that of the US.
It's not a popular opinion but if I was the EU I would do the following:
(1) Fully fund Firefox or an alternative browser (with a 100% open source commitment and verifiable builds so we know the people who get ideas like chatcontrol can't slip something bad in)
(2) Pass a law to the effect: "Violate DNT and the c-suite goes to jail and the company pays 200% of yearly revenue"
I liked the original Opera—it’s been a while, but I think I actually paid for it on Windows a long, long time ago—but I’m not sure they were ever a “potential Mozilla,” at least in the way I would interpret that. They were a closed source, commercial browser founded by a for-profit company.
(Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway, which is not a member of the European Union.)
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/about
> The Problem: America is in a monopoly crisis. A monopoly is, at its core, a private government that sets the terms, services, and wages in a market, like how Mark Zuckerberg structures discourse in social networking. Every monopoly is a mini-dictatorship over a market. And today, there are monopolies everywhere. They are in big markets, like search engines, medicine, cable, and shipping. They are also in small ones, like mail sorting software and cheerleading. Over 75% of American industries are more consolidated today than they were decades ago.
> Unregulated monopolies cause a lot of problems. They raise prices, lower wages, and move money from rural areas to a few gilded cities. Dominant firms don’t focus on competing, they focus on corrupting our politics to protect their market power. Monopolies are also brittle, and tend to put all their eggs in one basket, which results in shortages. There is a reason everyone hates monopolies, and why we’ve hated them for hundreds of years.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/17/graph-theory-o... (Food consolidation)
https://followthemoney.com/infographic-the-u-s-media-is-cont... (Media consolidation)
https://www.kearney.com/industry/energy/article/how-utilitie... (US electric utilities)
https://aglawjournal.wp.drake.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6... [pdf] (Agriculture consolidation)
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-major-tech-acqu... (Big Tech consolidation)