11 ms·

“ The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations – like Mozilla – best positioned to drive competiti

“ The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations – like Mozilla – best positioned to drive competition and protect the interests of consumers on the web.” Or in other words ... “We need Google’s money” ... Firefox

nikitaga 6y ago
In other words, buying a default position in a browser or OS is not an anti-competitive practice. Many other things Google does are, but this isn't. This DOJ lawsuit is basically a gift to Google if you actually think through what it is likely to achieve, and what a better targeted lawsuit could have achieved but won't, because DOJ chose to instead spend its resources on a weak case for an issue that is largely irrelevant to Google's moat.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Isn't it, though? What's the share of views from Opera or even Brave? Owning #1 and having the rather distant #2 beholden to you makes it even less likely that a market upstart will be able to emerge; particularly when #1 and #2 are loss leaders.
  - nikitaga 6y ago
    Having money to buy something that is for sale is not anti-competitive in itself, neither is selling stuff to a monopolist at market rates. You need to look at why Google's adtech is so obscenely profitable, why they are able to generate so much profit per user. A lot of it is powered by things that either already are or should be illegal, from various abuses of monopolistic power to forced tracking without informed consent. Fixing those issues would be a good start. Otherwise, nothing will change. Google has enough of its own moat with Pixel devices and Android and Chrome that banning or somehow restricting the sale of default search engine position will hurt sellers of those defaults like Mozilla much more than it will hurt Google's monopoly. Just because the lawsuit is on paper targeted at Google, doesn't mean that their competitors (or the public) will be the beneficiaries of its results.
    - coliveira 6y ago
      People misinterpret what antitrust is all about. It is not about making transactions at market rates. It is about having the power to define market rates through the operations of the company (trust) and its close associates. All the characteristics of trusts appear in Google's behavior when they buy competitors and pay their buddies (FF) to deal with them. When they say that people "chose" to use Google properties, this is clearly false in the moment that they buy would be competitors and pay FF and Apple prices that cannot be replicated by others.
      - nikitaga 6y ago
        Just what kind of conspiracy do you think exists between Google, Mozilla, and Apple? Those seem to be normal business relationships. Google being the highest bidder, i.e. paying "prices that can not be replicated by others" does not make an antitrust case alone. By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc. Buying competitors (DoubleClick) is the kind of stuff that should have been prevented on antitrust grounds, but that is not related to the search box transaction at all, and is not the focus of this lawsuit.
        coliveira 6y ago
        > By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc I don't know any billionaire who has cornered the market for real estate, art, etc. Your example just shows that there is something special about the web search market: it was cornered by Google using several strategies that amount to monopoly.
        nikitaga 6y ago
        Yet you haven't provided any explanation why Google's deals with Mozilla and Apple should be considered anti-competitive. Those deals are not how Google became ubiquitous, neither in search nor in advertising. Once again, do you think Microsoft doesn't have the same money as Google to pay for default search placement? Or do you think Apple or Mozilla won't take their money? I'm sure Microsoft has the money. They just don't want to spend it on this because they don't earn as much money from their search users as Google does, so Google outbids them. You keep talking about generalities of Google's monopoly position, but I'm not disputing that their monopoly position is problematic and should be reigned it. What I'm saying is that this particular lawsuit succeeding will at best be a wash all things considered, and at worst will entrench Google's moat even further if it kills off Mozilla. Or, if you don't think so, what kind of court-imposed solution do you think will come out of this lawsuit?
- snarf21 6y ago
  Microsoft lost this argument with regards to IE.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Depends what you think the resolution is going to be. If they stop them funding other browsers maybe. ...If they force Google to divest Chrome, it's not going to be a gift. All this is proving is there is no effective alternative to breaking Google up and selling it off in parts.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    I think breaking up Google would be the best option for the market, and even for shareholders. The value of the company after splitting will most probably be higher than under control of the current leadership. They're killing lots of great products in order to maintain the monopoly of search.
- fooey 6y ago
  I feel like this DOJ suit is so lazy and misguided, the end result will be inoculating Google against anti-trust for a generation.
darksaints 6y ago
It's not that simple. Sure, Google currently pays the bills, but when they go to negotiate, Bing is their BATNA, and the BATNA is what negotiations always trend towards. Mozilla benefits more from a stronger Bing than they do a stronger Google.
- wmf 6y ago
  If Google is banned from buying search engine defaults, Bing might be hit by the same ban or at least they'd no longer be bidding against Google so now they'd just have to outrun... DDG?
  - darksaints 6y ago
    I think this is the best explanation for Mozilla's position on this. It would be a death blow for Mozilla if google was taken out of the running altogether, simply because then their BATNA would be DDG. It's not clear if anti-trust action against google will affect Google's ability to buy default traffic from Mozilla, which is why they haven't taken a particularly strong position yet. Some forms of anti trust action could help Mozilla by bolstering competitors, but other types of actions could hurt Mozilla. It seems like a wait and see kind of thing.
    - wmf 6y ago
      BTW every time competition comes up in this case we should probably ask: competition in what? The case appears to be focusing on search engines and ad networks, but trying to create more competition in search could end up reducing competition in browsers (hence Mozilla's concern about collateral damage). Google is so huge and has so many interlocking monopolies that I don't envy anyone who's trying to fix any of it.
      - toast0 6y ago
        Even if browser competition is important, and even if that (currently) requires a stream of money to flow to Mozilla, it doesn't follow that we should allow unlawful abuse of other monopolies in order to support that. Of course, it's possible the courts decide the status quo is lawful and there's no change. In a hypothetical situation where you separate Google Ads from Google Search from Google everything else, Google search would still want to pay browsers for default search, and Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc would still have a revenue stream; however, they would only be able to do so to the extent of their web search revenues. Likely the baby Googles are still dominant in all of their fields, but it's not as assured, because there will be less cross promotion, exclusivity, and tying. If you instead leave Google whole, and prohibit paying browsers for default search, you still have internal payments (de facto, if not explicit) to Chrome and Android that drive product decisions like defaults and putting an unremovable search bar in the default launcher.
75dvtwin 6y ago
Warning: hypothesis It could be that Mozilla's role in the whole scheme of things is to act as 'Plausible Deniability' defense for big G. Which is, probably, what that Mozilla's current CEO lawyer is there for. Google needed to get rid of Brendan Eich (Mozilla's CEO that was to browsers, like Bill Gates to Windows) - for the plausible deniability defense to work [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-deserve-to-be-removed-from-his-position-due-to-his-support-for-proposition-8/#2a3181d22158 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
- cryptica 6y ago
  This is a good hypothesis. Unfortunately, plausible hypotheses and the truth have a way of getting downvoted to the bottom of the comment section these days. I always find myself scrolling straight to the bottom of the last page of HN discussions to find interesting comments. Downvote if you agree.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  So what about the five years between when Eich left to 2019, where Chris Beard, an MBA as CEO? Plus, why would Yahoo have wanted the search contract then?
ComodoHacker 6y ago
It's more like "We need money. Due to Google monopolistic position, it's Google's money for now."
- walrus01 6y ago
  I think you would see a (further) mass exodus from people using Firefox if they suddenly changed the default search engine for all versions, in all languages worldwide, to Bing.
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Is there even enough mass market adoption for such an exodus at this point? Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome. From my subjective experience, the only people I see using it today are technical.
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      People keep claiming this, but how has Mozilla 'ceded' anything? Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible. As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that. What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?
      - pferde 6y ago
        By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice. Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
        sgc 6y ago
        I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver. I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening. So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.
walrus01 6y ago
Earlier in the day I read several news articles about the US V. Google lawsuit. Before I even clicked the link, while hovering over it, I thought "I wonder how close they're going to come in this response to biting the hand that feeds them... How are they going to possibly handle this?" It is my understanding that something like 95% of mozilla's gross revenue each year comes from the google search commission deal. If I am wrong on this somebody please correct me.
syspec 6y ago
Dead on
cryptica 6y ago
It's unsettling how they try to make themselves look like the little guy fighting for justice... They get over $400 million revenue per year, much of it from Google. They're part of the problem. They're gatekeepers. Also, their funding initiatives to change the web are total BS. They don't want to change anything. They will only fund projects that reinforce the established order and help to lock out the competition. They like things just as they are. They have no idea what it's like to actually be the little guy.
nulbyte 6y ago
I would be surprised if Mozilla doesn't charge everyone who is available out of the box. If they don't, they should. I don't think there should be a default. New users should be presented a list to select their preferred search engine. This could be an educational effort; many users are likely unaware that there are alternatives. Many users don't care, because they don't understand the difference. A brief onboarding experience would help increase awareness, and it would avoid the codependency problem Mozilla itself created.
snarf21 6y ago
This whole things just seems so silly to address. Instead of making it the default search engine simply have a search engine chooser at install. Google is "preferred" (which they still pay for) but below that is a list that is searchable of all other search engines to choose.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  Google paying for that position is the same anti-competitive act they are being sued for.
ashtonkem 6y ago
The idea that a severance of Google’s alleged monopoly would cause a collapse of the competition actually undermines Mozilla’s point and strengthen’s the US’s point, ironically enough.
- xxpor 6y ago
  How so? It seems like either outcome is bad.
  - blackearl 6y ago
    Firefox's waning market share and need to suckle upon Google's teat to survive will only get worse and more dependent with time. So if Google doesn't meet all the qualifications of a monopoly now, it'll be much worse if the US waits to take action.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      But if Mozilla goes away because Google can't pay them, are we actually better off?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - coliveira 6y ago
        In that case Firefox will be able to make deals with companies other than Google, such as Apple and MS.
        Spivak 6y ago
        But they can literally already do that right now. Google just pays more. Nothing forces them to go with Google — they even switched to Yahoo for a bit. This only ends with Mozilla getting less money since without Google bidding the value of the placement goes down.
        6y ago
j4nt4b 6y ago
I wonder if Firefox partnering with Duck Duck Go instead would be feasible, or even a net positive for users and developers. I'll admit to partly liking this idea just for the Game of Thrones spiteful backstab energy.
- boogies 6y ago
  Palemoon does this. But I don’t think they can afford to pay nearly as much: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840474
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  It would bankrupt either Firefox or DDG
LockAndLol 6y ago
Maybe people should be able to donate directly to Firefox development and not to some controlling org that decides to "invest" the money as it sees fit. But that would be too honest and easy. Gotta have a way to siphon off lots of money for your own bloated salary and the best way to do that is to be between donation and destination. I'm not sure why the Firefox people haven't split from Mozilla to rectify this. What's keeping them there? Didn't Thunderbird devs split? What am I missing?
- coliveira 6y ago
  > why the Firefox people haven't split from Mozilla Because it is their job! Do you have a rival company to hire all these people?

nikitaga 6y ago

In other words, buying a default position in a browser or OS is not an anti-competitive practice. Many other things Google does are, but this isn't. This DOJ lawsuit is basically a gift to Google if you actually think through what it is likely to achieve, and what a better targeted lawsuit could have achieved but won't, because DOJ chose to instead spend its resources on a weak case for an issue that is largely irrelevant to Google's moat.

dleslie 6y ago
Isn't it, though? What's the share of views from Opera or even Brave? Owning #1 and having the rather distant #2 beholden to you makes it even less likely that a market upstart will be able to emerge; particularly when #1 and #2 are loss leaders.
- nikitaga 6y ago
  Having money to buy something that is for sale is not anti-competitive in itself, neither is selling stuff to a monopolist at market rates. You need to look at why Google's adtech is so obscenely profitable, why they are able to generate so much profit per user. A lot of it is powered by things that either already are or should be illegal, from various abuses of monopolistic power to forced tracking without informed consent. Fixing those issues would be a good start. Otherwise, nothing will change. Google has enough of its own moat with Pixel devices and Android and Chrome that banning or somehow restricting the sale of default search engine position will hurt sellers of those defaults like Mozilla much more than it will hurt Google's monopoly. Just because the lawsuit is on paper targeted at Google, doesn't mean that their competitors (or the public) will be the beneficiaries of its results.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    People misinterpret what antitrust is all about. It is not about making transactions at market rates. It is about having the power to define market rates through the operations of the company (trust) and its close associates. All the characteristics of trusts appear in Google's behavior when they buy competitors and pay their buddies (FF) to deal with them. When they say that people "chose" to use Google properties, this is clearly false in the moment that they buy would be competitors and pay FF and Apple prices that cannot be replicated by others.
    - nikitaga 6y ago
      Just what kind of conspiracy do you think exists between Google, Mozilla, and Apple? Those seem to be normal business relationships. Google being the highest bidder, i.e. paying "prices that can not be replicated by others" does not make an antitrust case alone. By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc. Buying competitors (DoubleClick) is the kind of stuff that should have been prevented on antitrust grounds, but that is not related to the search box transaction at all, and is not the focus of this lawsuit.
      - coliveira 6y ago
        > By that logic you could sue every billionaire buying expensive real estate, art, surgeries, etc I don't know any billionaire who has cornered the market for real estate, art, etc. Your example just shows that there is something special about the web search market: it was cornered by Google using several strategies that amount to monopoly.
        nikitaga 6y ago
        Yet you haven't provided any explanation why Google's deals with Mozilla and Apple should be considered anti-competitive. Those deals are not how Google became ubiquitous, neither in search nor in advertising. Once again, do you think Microsoft doesn't have the same money as Google to pay for default search placement? Or do you think Apple or Mozilla won't take their money? I'm sure Microsoft has the money. They just don't want to spend it on this because they don't earn as much money from their search users as Google does, so Google outbids them. You keep talking about generalities of Google's monopoly position, but I'm not disputing that their monopoly position is problematic and should be reigned it. What I'm saying is that this particular lawsuit succeeding will at best be a wash all things considered, and at worst will entrench Google's moat even further if it kills off Mozilla. Or, if you don't think so, what kind of court-imposed solution do you think will come out of this lawsuit?
snarf21 6y ago
Microsoft lost this argument with regards to IE.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Depends what you think the resolution is going to be. If they stop them funding other browsers maybe. ...If they force Google to divest Chrome, it's not going to be a gift. All this is proving is there is no effective alternative to breaking Google up and selling it off in parts.
- coliveira 6y ago
  I think breaking up Google would be the best option for the market, and even for shareholders. The value of the company after splitting will most probably be higher than under control of the current leadership. They're killing lots of great products in order to maintain the monopoly of search.
fooey 6y ago
I feel like this DOJ suit is so lazy and misguided, the end result will be inoculating Google against anti-trust for a generation.

darksaints 6y ago

It's not that simple. Sure, Google currently pays the bills, but when they go to negotiate, Bing is their BATNA, and the BATNA is what negotiations always trend towards. Mozilla benefits more from a stronger Bing than they do a stronger Google.

wmf 6y ago
If Google is banned from buying search engine defaults, Bing might be hit by the same ban or at least they'd no longer be bidding against Google so now they'd just have to outrun... DDG?
- darksaints 6y ago
  I think this is the best explanation for Mozilla's position on this. It would be a death blow for Mozilla if google was taken out of the running altogether, simply because then their BATNA would be DDG. It's not clear if anti-trust action against google will affect Google's ability to buy default traffic from Mozilla, which is why they haven't taken a particularly strong position yet. Some forms of anti trust action could help Mozilla by bolstering competitors, but other types of actions could hurt Mozilla. It seems like a wait and see kind of thing.
  - wmf 6y ago
    BTW every time competition comes up in this case we should probably ask: competition in what? The case appears to be focusing on search engines and ad networks, but trying to create more competition in search could end up reducing competition in browsers (hence Mozilla's concern about collateral damage). Google is so huge and has so many interlocking monopolies that I don't envy anyone who's trying to fix any of it.
    - toast0 6y ago
      Even if browser competition is important, and even if that (currently) requires a stream of money to flow to Mozilla, it doesn't follow that we should allow unlawful abuse of other monopolies in order to support that. Of course, it's possible the courts decide the status quo is lawful and there's no change. In a hypothetical situation where you separate Google Ads from Google Search from Google everything else, Google search would still want to pay browsers for default search, and Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc would still have a revenue stream; however, they would only be able to do so to the extent of their web search revenues. Likely the baby Googles are still dominant in all of their fields, but it's not as assured, because there will be less cross promotion, exclusivity, and tying. If you instead leave Google whole, and prohibit paying browsers for default search, you still have internal payments (de facto, if not explicit) to Chrome and Android that drive product decisions like defaults and putting an unremovable search bar in the default launcher.

75dvtwin 6y ago

Warning: hypothesis It could be that Mozilla's role in the whole scheme of things is to act as 'Plausible Deniability' defense for big G. Which is, probably, what that Mozilla's current CEO lawyer is there for. Google needed to get rid of Brendan Eich (Mozilla's CEO that was to browsers, like Bill Gates to Windows) - for the plausible deniability defense to work [1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-deserve-to-be-removed-from-his-position-due-to-his-support-for-proposition-8/#2a3181d22158 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...

cryptica 6y ago
This is a good hypothesis. Unfortunately, plausible hypotheses and the truth have a way of getting downvoted to the bottom of the comment section these days. I always find myself scrolling straight to the bottom of the last page of HN discussions to find interesting comments. Downvote if you agree.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
So what about the five years between when Eich left to 2019, where Chris Beard, an MBA as CEO? Plus, why would Yahoo have wanted the search contract then?

ComodoHacker 6y ago

It's more like "We need money. Due to Google monopolistic position, it's Google's money for now."

walrus01 6y ago
I think you would see a (further) mass exodus from people using Firefox if they suddenly changed the default search engine for all versions, in all languages worldwide, to Bing.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Is there even enough mass market adoption for such an exodus at this point? Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome. From my subjective experience, the only people I see using it today are technical.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    People keep claiming this, but how has Mozilla 'ceded' anything? Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible. As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that. What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?
    - pferde 6y ago
      By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice. Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
      - sgc 6y ago
        I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver. I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening. So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.

walrus01 6y ago

Earlier in the day I read several news articles about the US V. Google lawsuit. Before I even clicked the link, while hovering over it, I thought "I wonder how close they're going to come in this response to biting the hand that feeds them... How are they going to possibly handle this?" It is my understanding that something like 95% of mozilla's gross revenue each year comes from the google search commission deal. If I am wrong on this somebody please correct me.

syspec 6y ago

Dead on

cryptica 6y ago

It's unsettling how they try to make themselves look like the little guy fighting for justice... They get over $400 million revenue per year, much of it from Google. They're part of the problem. They're gatekeepers. Also, their funding initiatives to change the web are total BS. They don't want to change anything. They will only fund projects that reinforce the established order and help to lock out the competition. They like things just as they are. They have no idea what it's like to actually be the little guy.

nulbyte 6y ago

I would be surprised if Mozilla doesn't charge everyone who is available out of the box. If they don't, they should. I don't think there should be a default. New users should be presented a list to select their preferred search engine. This could be an educational effort; many users are likely unaware that there are alternatives. Many users don't care, because they don't understand the difference. A brief onboarding experience would help increase awareness, and it would avoid the codependency problem Mozilla itself created.

snarf21 6y ago

This whole things just seems so silly to address. Instead of making it the default search engine simply have a search engine chooser at install. Google is "preferred" (which they still pay for) but below that is a list that is searchable of all other search engines to choose.

arrosenberg 6y ago
Google paying for that position is the same anti-competitive act they are being sued for.

ashtonkem 6y ago

The idea that a severance of Google’s alleged monopoly would cause a collapse of the competition actually undermines Mozilla’s point and strengthen’s the US’s point, ironically enough.

xxpor 6y ago
How so? It seems like either outcome is bad.
- blackearl 6y ago
  Firefox's waning market share and need to suckle upon Google's teat to survive will only get worse and more dependent with time. So if Google doesn't meet all the qualifications of a monopoly now, it'll be much worse if the US waits to take action.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    But if Mozilla goes away because Google can't pay them, are we actually better off?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - coliveira 6y ago
      In that case Firefox will be able to make deals with companies other than Google, such as Apple and MS.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        But they can literally already do that right now. Google just pays more. Nothing forces them to go with Google — they even switched to Yahoo for a bit. This only ends with Mozilla getting less money since without Google bidding the value of the placement goes down.
      - 6y ago

j4nt4b 6y ago

I wonder if Firefox partnering with Duck Duck Go instead would be feasible, or even a net positive for users and developers. I'll admit to partly liking this idea just for the Game of Thrones spiteful backstab energy.

boogies 6y ago
Palemoon does this. But I don’t think they can afford to pay nearly as much: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840474
srtjstjsj 6y ago
It would bankrupt either Firefox or DDG

LockAndLol 6y ago

Maybe people should be able to donate directly to Firefox development and not to some controlling org that decides to "invest" the money as it sees fit. But that would be too honest and easy. Gotta have a way to siphon off lots of money for your own bloated salary and the best way to do that is to be between donation and destination. I'm not sure why the Firefox people haven't split from Mozilla to rectify this. What's keeping them there? Didn't Thunderbird devs split? What am I missing?

coliveira 6y ago
> why the Firefox people haven't split from Mozilla Because it is their job! Do you have a rival company to hire all these people?