Comment by necovek 8 days ago
A job for advocacy division is to, uhm, advocate for the product and mission.
We all know how that has worked out in the last decade or so (down to <3% market share from 14% in 2014 and 31% in 2009, though I wonder about absolute numbers as number of Internet users has gone up).
It's fine for Mozilla to recognize this as a failed approach (or team), without dropping their mission altogether.
The Internet has never been less free and open than it is today. Their advocacy has utterly failed.
> The Internet has never been less free and open than it is today.
In what ways? I'd say it was less free and open when Microsoft controlled almost everyone's browsers, when user data was sent in the open (https wasn't standard), .... It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
> Their advocacy has utterly failed.
What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
We're back to a browser monoculture, Chrome, and Google controls browsers to maliciously cripple ad blocking because it affects their bottom line.
DRM is rampant.
Network neutrality is moribund at best.
Power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few megacorps so you and I can't, for example, run our own email servers if we expect to actually be able to communicate with users of Google or Microsoft.
AI companies get rich doing things that would be illegal for you and me, such as hoovering up copyrighted works without paying for them.
Surveillance is pervasive.
That's just off the top of my head.
>> The Internet has never been less free and open than it is today.
> In what ways?
In the past the internet was a collection of a multitude of relatively open and decentralized sites. Now, it's utterly dominated by a few large platforms, frequently focused on exploiting user data to the fullest. Everything else is pretty marginal.
This time Google controls everyone's browsers, and has perverse conflict of interest between advertising and users - which Microsoft didn't had(yet).
also internet has become more and more centralized compared to it's heyday. even that alone makes it less free and open.
> I'd say it was less free and open when Microsoft controlled almost everyone's browsers
Now it's Google, so that situation hasn't changed any.
> What have they advocated for that has 'utterly failed'?
Privacy and keeping the web open, mostly. The privacy situation is worse now than ever, and the open web is continuing to shrink.
> It was less free and open in early days when users was restricted to specific types of work; for example, I think conducting business wasn't allowed.
When was this? I've been on the internet since before it was open to the general public, and I don't remember a time when users were restricted to specific types of work, nor a time when conducting business was not allowed.
One huge success that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in this discussion is the Let’s Encrypt project which was started by Mozilla staff and has had remarkable success in setting up a public key infrastructure that makes it free – and easy – for server admins to configure TLS on their web servers. 20 years ago HTTP was the default protocol for web traffic; now HTTPS is the default.
> What open standards have they tried and failed to influence,
That's most definitely a reference to the comitees Mozilla is part of, i.e. the W3C, but never actually meaningfully influence their decisions. Google just does whatever it wants, and the rest need to chase their implementation or become less relevant as website start using the new features.
> and where have they succeeded?
I thought their point was that Mozilla doesn't...?
Firefox is a tool they use to achieve that mission: success of it should correlate with them achieving free and open internet.
If that is not the case, and they have achieved their mission with Firefox being a non-factor, they should instead stop funding FF development.
At Mozilla, they advocate for a free and open Internet, user privacy, and more. That's part of the organizations mission. See the OP for more information.