Mozilla’s mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web.  We therefore welcome the call from publishers’ associations DCN and WAN-IFRA for stakeholders in the open Web to join the discussion on digital advertising practices.

The Web is a unique medium.  In contrast with proprietary software platforms the Web is:

• permissive to publish on
• free to implement
• intentionally device agnostic

These properties make the Web the most publicly beneficial medium of our time and the proliferation of content on the Web is crucial to its continued growth. All participants in the ecosystem have interests that must be acknowledged and respected, including users and publishers.

We believe that the only way that the Web continues to exist as an open and vital asset is if we focus on its long term health. We have been advocating for this focus both in product and in policy. We are happy to see others recognize this need in both making and responding to this call to action.

We believe there needs to be leadership from all parts of the Web ecosystem in order to ensure the long term health of the Web – and while publishers must do their part, they cannot do it in isolation.  Mozilla intends to participate in this effort, especially contributing our perspective on how advertising should exist in our product.  We will continue to focus on, amongst other things:  

• tracking and privacy
• security
• page performance
• page payload sizes
• auto-playing media
• pop-ups, pop-unders, other advertising-initiated browser events

And naturally, we will continue to listen to our users, whom Firefox exists to serve.  We will continue to focus on delivering them transparency, choice and control.  We look forward to collaborating with industry partners who share these principles.