What if 90% of a politician's campaign funds came from one source?
It doesn't have to be overt, I doubt Mozilla makes many decisions by asking themselves, "will this make Google happy or unhappy?"
But consider that Mozilla knows what Microsoft and Yahoo's top bids were. Their ability to switch from one funder to another is dependent on how high those bids were.
That is not the same situation. With a politician, one source can contribute X, and another source can contribute Y, and both of their contributions influence the politician. In other words, if the politician loses a source of donations equal to 90% of his or her donations, there is probably nothing that would replace that donation. The only supply is percentage of the politician's time so to speak, which might effect how much someone is willing to donate in the absence of another donation, but probably not in the way the politician would like.
With Mozilla, the supply is one item, the default search engine for the search bar, something which has high demand. That means if Google were to become less interested in paying for the search bar, Bing would be waiting at the gates to do so. They could lose money if that were to happen, given that Google was the highest bidder, but that in no way makes them beholden to Google.
Not sure what you mean by high demand, it has certainly has had strategic value, but the grand total of companies that would be interested in the search box are Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
I wouldn't be looking forward to the next set of negotiations if I had Microsoft and Yahoo as my fallback positions.
Well, it must be different. The two companies compete directly on a number of products and Mozilla's decisions on whether to adopt things like NaCl, for instance, can't be too pleasing to Google.
Yet, I think you'd be right to question the independence of a politician who got 90% of their funding from Google. Maybe it is different because people interested in entering politics have less integrity and produce nothing of value so they are more in thrall to their biggest customer. ;-)
Maybe it is more like the academic projects I've worked on. 100% of the money is from the US Government but none of us are patriotic in the least. We just care about doing the research.
Or how about the US government, which gets most of its funding from US tax payers and China and never seems to do anything that pleases either group.
Or children that get all of their basic needs met by their parents and still grow up to rebel and hate them.
I think politicians are just a special case in being particularly worse than the average human being in terms of ethics, morality and intelligence. :-)
It doesn't have to be overt, I doubt Mozilla makes many decisions by asking themselves, "will this make Google happy or unhappy?"
But consider that Mozilla knows what Microsoft and Yahoo's top bids were. Their ability to switch from one funder to another is dependent on how high those bids were.