The Nozilla Campaign and Its Ironic Effects

Mozilla didn’t completely dodge its political problem with the resignation of its CEO. In the aftermath, a coalition of dodgy-looking anti-gay groups have managed a fairly spectacular boycott of Firefox, Mozilla’s best known product. It may be splashy, but it is an amusingly inept boycott. First, it is a boycott of a charitable organization which makes its products freely available to the world as a matter of course, so Mozilla will not see any loss of market presence or revenue — the boycotters never paid anything in the first place. Second, most major browsers derive in various ways from work done at Mozilla, so if people are using Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari, among others, they are still living in Mozilla’s world. Third, there is little reason to believe the anti-gay activists who say they are deleting Firefox from their computers. It seems more likely that they never heard of Firefox before and have no Firefox to delete. This scenario seems all the more likely when you look at the petition pages. The petition authors felt the need to explain in detail what Firefox is and the process for uninstalling it. The instructions seem to be written for a person who has never installed or uninstalled an application before and might not quite understand what an application is. Fourth, the petition has no leverage. At set forth, it is a permanent boycott, meaning the signers will never use Firefox ever no matter what Mozilla does in the future, so the boycott isn’t meant to exert any influence over Mozilla’s future actions.

All that is bad enough, but the whole sequence plays into the stereotype of the culture-war social conservatives as religious extremists who never create anything and only want to destroy things. They never created an application or even asked someone to install a piece of software — at least that is what the stereotype would have you believe — but they don’t mind telling you to delete things. Pity the activist who follows the boycott instructions to uninstall Firefox — then after dutifully deleting the browser, finds that there is no way to return to the Internet for further instructions. At that point, they will realize that they’ve been had, but then what can they do?

The commentators who view the Mozilla episode as a management case study say the lesson is that you can’t undo a bad hire by firing the person — and that is certainly true enough. This episode could lead to real change, then, if other boards of directors look at the sequence of events and conclude that anti-gay activists or political extremists in general can never be considered for any executive position, lest it lead to a boycott when they are passed over or are fired or quit. If that is the way this episode is understood, then it could result in freezing out the very political extremists who the Nozilla campaign is supposed to protect.

An essential part of understanding the Nozilla campaign is that there isn’t any way observers can measure it directly. No central database records the deletion of an application, so we will never learn if the number of Mozilla installations that were actually deleted was just 30, or a few thousand. In any case, the number is too small to show up in the global browser usage statistics that browser makers compete for. The Nozilla campaign gets most of its might from the fact that its effects can’t be measured. You are supposed to imagine that the number of uninstalls is tens of thousands, something similar to the number of signators recorded on the petitions. In reality, the actual number would have to be much smaller, just based on browser share statistics. The actual number of uninstalls could be tiny if you compare the difficulty of signing a petition to that of uninstalling an application. But no one knows, and that allows Nozilla to be taken seriously.

In my view, the Nozilla campaign is the most important part of this whole story, but I worry a little about the state of Mozilla after this glimpse at its inner workings. No one there seems to have any inkling that they did something wrong in appointing a CEO who did not share the organization’s priorities and who, in barely a week, proved himself utterly inept in speaking on behalf of the organization he was supposed to be leading. To be blunt, Mozilla selected a figure-head for an organization that needs a real leader. Perhaps they do realize this and just don’t want to say publicly anything more than the bare minimum necessary at this point. Or perhaps they really don’t have any appreciation for the struggles and challenges of the past year and the year ahead. Only Mozilla’s future success or failure will really answer that question.

A Conflicted CEO at Mozilla

Freedom is full of paradoxes. The very idea of freedom of speech implies a fundamental paradox. Where there is freedom of speech, it guarantees you the ability to speak out against freedom of all kinds, including the freedom that allows you to speak.

This paradox was never more apparent than in the case of Brendan Eich, who for reasons that have not been explained, somehow became CEO of Mozilla. I was mortified when I learned this had happened. I am an everyday user of Mozilla’s popular Firefox web browser, and a very occasional financial and technical contributor, and I was already unhappy to see the way the quality and stability of the browser has declined in recent years. From what little I had heard of Eich, his background is not identified with software quality. Perhaps worse, he is noted for an indifference to matters of software security, which is a matter of utmost importance when it comes to network communications tools such as web browsers.

Eich’s professional background probably should have disqualified him from an executive post at a software company, but his political activities are reason enough to disqualify him. The media, understandably, seized on just one of Eich’s political contributions, but Eich, I learned along with everyone else, has a long history of contributions to political causes that may fairly be characterized as extreme. The only apparent connecting link is that the causes and candidates all actively oppose the principle of personal freedom. This is a big problem if you want to be a Mozilla executive. You cannot comfortably be taking public positions against personal freedom while at the same time occupying a position of trust, shepherding Internet communications tools where the potential to undercut users’ personal freedom is an everyday concern.

When you look at Eich, you see the paradox of freedom that I mentioned. He is not merely, or mainly, a supporter of anti-freedom causes. He is also a fervent supporter of open-source software, a cause that fundamentally is identified with freedom. Some of the politicians he has supported would ban the very open-source software Eich has worked on if they got the chance, but that is the paradox of freedom at work. This kind of conflicted public presence is perhaps what you expect from an ordinary worker, but corporate officers are held to a higher standard. They cannot undercut their official duties with these kinds of contradictions. An office is, by definition, a position of trust. An officer cannot publicly stand against the principles that his office stands for. The Mozilla CEO in his public persona cannot stand against personal freedom any more than he can make public statements in opposition to the ideas of Internet standards or network security, or any of the other principles or qualities that Mozilla specifically stands for.

Eich had a chance to distance himself from his past actions, but elected not to do so. And so Eich, rightly, is out, and Mozilla’s users and supporters can hope the board is not so reckless when it chooses its next CEO. Despite all its recent problems, Firefox is still the most imitated web browser and the one that all other web browsers are compared to. With a well-chosen leader, I hope, perhaps the level of quality that Mozilla represented in the past can come back.

This Week in Bank Failures

New evidence that the AIG bailout was a mistake: AIG has sued New York state, asking a court to find that the insurance giant is exempt from the enforcement of laws meant to prevent fraudulent insurance marketing practices. Well, if having an office on Wall Street doesn’t place you above the law, then I don’t know what does.

U.S. student loan debt has shot past the $1 trillion mark, in part because college graduates from the last 7 years are having difficulty finding the kind of professional employment that would allow them to repay their loans on schedule. Student loan debt would jump higher under the House budget plan. The budget resolution that the House passed without irony on April Fool’s Day would limit college grants and raise the interest rates that students pay while they are still in school.

As China moves away from its past practice of propping up every bonehead business, banks are recording more bad loans than ever, $10 billion in 2013, still not a large amount in the scheme of things, but perhaps enough to get banks to start taking underwriting seriously. China says bank stress tests will be coming in the near future.

The Russian Central Bank said today it may “temporarily” close most of the banks in Crimea because of liquidity problems there.

Cyprus is working on legislation to make it easier for banks to foreclose when borrowers stop making payments on loans. The head of the central bank says it is the key step needed to speed up the recovery of the country’s banks, but everyone agrees it won’t be easy legislation to write.

The Inbox Index

If my email inbox is any indication, the U.S. economy is in for a booming Q2. Since the second quarter began on Tuesday, I’ve been deluged with email coming in, most of it promoting something new, most of it intentionally scheduled to arrive in April rather than March.

Along with the commercial email, there has been more than the usual new-quarter flow of job openings. I don’t have time to read these messages — they arrive in spite of every online profile indicating I will not be on the job market for the foreseeable future — but the subject lines suggest I am being considered for jobs I am arguably not qualified for. For example, I worked on mainframe systems for years, so would I be willing to learn Cobol? That degree of recruiting desperation is surely a sign of a tightening technology job market in which hiring managers can’t find the workers they really want.

There are also the usual newsletters and event announcements. All put together, my email inbox is about twice as heavy as it was on March 31, and three days in, I consider it a trend. I can’t really give the increase in email much weight as an indicator of where the economy is going, but it does seem like a sign that activity is picking up, and usually that’s a positive for the economic aggregates.

Shopping at the NSA

A new Harris Interactive survey shows that Americans have become more wary of online shopping and banking because of government snooping. Amrita Jayakumar writes at the Washington Post:

Americans say they’re shopping less online. Blame the NSA.

The NSA is intentionally undermining Internet security with its spyware and break-ins and its sponsorship of compromised software. But it is safe to say that the NSA does not mean to undermine the U.S. economy. If 26 percent of consumers are shopping less, or are slower to put their money in the bank and take it out again, that is a sign of lack of marketplace confidence, and it can slow down the entire economy. It is not so much that consumers feel like they are putting themselves at risk by shopping online (though some, of course, do feel that way). Rather, people are stopping to ask what kind of impression their online actions might make on the spies who are watching everyone’s transactions. It might not seem like much of a slowdown, but the result of this self-conscious approach to online transactions is that each transaction takes more time. When individual transactions take more time, it allows fewer transactions in any given period of time. Metaphorically, the wheels of commerce turn slower.

This is not what the politicians in charge of the NSA want to see. To paraphrase a former president, if people everywhere become self-conscious about shopping, then the terrorists have won. Ironically, this effect may lead to corrective action where the abstract concern about the ideal of personal privacy did not. Taking on the Washington mindset, if people want to protect their private lives, well, they’ll get over it. But if people are reluctant to go shopping, now that’s a real problem.