>Mozilla needs a replacement funding plan because Google can essentially turn the lights off at any point by simply refusing to pay them for search at next contract renewal.
And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.
It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.
I think Google is fairly arbitrarily deciding how much money to give to Mozilla (and it's roughly their current OpEx) - They aren't just buying search, they're also buying "competition" in the browser space.
Further, the kind of transition where Firefox might gain users from Chrome isn't instantaneous, and it turns out users have a preference here (most users don't want to have google removed from Firefox - they still prefer it. Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is: https://www.pcgamer.com/firefox-is-conducting-a-study-to-see...)
So there's a tension here that's beyond just enterprise deals.
Last - that deal didn't actually work out very well for Yahoo, and that was when Firefox had nearly 15% of the browser market (vs ~8% today).
>Mozilla is quietly testing a program to use Bing as the default, just to see how loud the feedback is:
Or Mozilla is running market research to show that X% of users don't care about the default search to drive up the price. As the deal isn't arbitrarily Google deciding an amount to give them, it's a bid between the major search engines. Just like it is for Safari.
And then Bing/Yandex/Baidu buys the rights, and all that changes is the amount they get. It'd drop if Google publicly vowed they won't bid on it anymore, but there's also the possibility that someone like Yahoo pays more than Google like what happened in 2015.
It's not like Google is arbitrarily deciding how much money to give Mozilla, they are buying something at the lowest price they can.