Well I mean a rich guy can come in and buy a company and shut it down. Or kill its product line or whatever the heck they want it's their company now

Nothing stopping someone else from starting a new company and picking up from where Mozilla left off

Yeah it sucks that Mozilla got bought out and now is beholden to Google. I just don't see how it's illegal

It's not illegal. The problem started when Microsoft gave away its Internet Explorer and email package for 'free' with Windows.

The so-called 'free' model undermined all those small companies that were making competitive products and put them out of business.

If competition had been allowed to proceed as normal we'd have much, much better browser and email products today. All the nonsense with Mozilla and others would never have occurred.

The fact was these products weren't actually free as Microsoft costed them into the price of Windows. Unfortunately, until software came along no one assumed that anticompetitive practices could be used in this way to put competitors out of business. Even now, decades later, antitrust/anti-competition law still hasn't outlawed this practice.

Make no mistake about this. What happened should not be forgotten and antitrust/anticompetitive law strengthened to see that there's no such repetition.

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Edit: don't forget Google is doing the same as Microsoft with Chrome. When behemoth companies can squash competition with 'free' giveaways of key products/essential technologies we've no longer free markets, it not olny distorts the process of competitive capitalism but stifles innovation. Simply, companies like Mozilla wouldn't be forced into devious practices just to survive.

Remember, browsers and email aren't just show bag giveaways, they're crucial products for our modern world. No company should be allowed to dominate them at the expense of other competition.