A Golden Clause for Mozilla ⇥ recode.net

Kara Swisher at Recode, with one hell of a scoop:

Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away.

That’s according to a clause in the Silicon Valley giant’s official agreement with the browser maker that CEO Marissa Mayer struck in late 2014 to become the default search engine on the well-known Firefox browser in the U.S.

That contract seems like a no-lose situation for Mozilla if Yahoo is acquired. If they like the new owners, Mozilla will likely retain the existing default search contract. If they don’t, they get a billion dollars by 2019 in addition to funds from whatever new contract they strike with a different search engine.