On behalf of Mohajer Law Firm, APC posted in civil litigation on Wednesday, December 13, 2017.
Parties in civil litigation in California may face enormous, even multi-million-dollar consequences. Earlier this month, Mozilla filed a lawsuit against Yahoo alleging breach of contract over a 2014 deal. Mozilla filed this countersuit after being sued by Yahoo and is seeking hundreds of million dollars in this action.
The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County, stems from a deal in which Yahoo agreed to pay Mozilla to provide searches within its Firefox Web browser. After Verizon acquired Yahoo’s websites this summer, Mozilla terminated this agreement and made Google its default search engine. In November, Mozilla launched a new version of its web browser and said that Google was its default search provider in North America.
Allegedly, Yahoo was still contractually-required to continue to pay Mozilla $375 million each year through 2019 even if it terminated Mozilla as its search partner. Days before this lawsuit, Yahoo already sued Mozilla for breach of contract. Yahoo claimed that it satisfied all the contract’s material obligations.
Yahoo originally entered this contract in a bold attempt to restore its competitive advantage in a Google-dominated search market, where the financial stakes are enormous. Yahoo and Google obtain lucrative advertising revenue from Web browsers and search ads were profitable for Yahoo even though Google was dominant in this market.
Mozilla charged that Yahoo did not meet expectations regarding its investment in its search engines and other assurances. It claimed that the Firefox browser market share fell by 25 percent because advertising was not relevant for users and the results were below average. Because of pervasive security breaches at Yahoo, Firefox users switched their search engines even though Yahoo was set as the default engine.
Civil litigation can have financial consequences for any party and devastate a business. An attorney can help assure that their rights are pursued in these proceedings.
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle, “Mozilla, Yahoo sue each other over search deal,” Wendy Lee, Dec. 5, 2017