Google only pays because Firefox has enough users to justify it. If enough users switch to Chrome because of broken Google-owned websites, why would they keep paying?

Also: controlled opposition.

I suppose you believe that the "artificial five-second delay” for Firefox was also a conspiracy ? Google already have billionaire-rich lawyers defending them - there is no need for unpaid volunteers.

From the zdnet interview with Johnathan Nightingale someone else linked:

"All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks."

"Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?"

"I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,"

When exactly should we shift our framing of an issue from "conspiracy theory" to "actual concern"?

Interesting to see from the inside, where it shows so obvious that such tactics are indeed successful on large scale.