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Apple Subpoenaed for Details on iOS Search Deal in Google Antitrust Investigation

Mad-B-One said:
Well, actually, on iDevices you have the choice between 3: Google, Yahoo! and Bing. That's it. Well, of course, you could install the Atomic browser (which you can mask to be something different like a IE or Firefox if you like) and you can search at Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, and Youtube as well. Still, no real alternative to the 3 propriatary search engines above.
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But is that limitation (again) at the hands of Apple or because other search engines havent attempted to write the code necessary for apple to use theirs? Im thinking in terms of Firefox; you can add any search engine you like, but its up to the search engine to add that functionality to firefox.
 
This behavior is as old as search itself.

Being one of the guys that built the Lycos search engine, I can remember the outrageous fees we paid just to be LISTED on Netscape's start page. It was even more to be the default.

And I'm talking about 1997, 98 here. Just about everyone who came along and became a funnel for internet traffic made significant amount of money charging search engines for placement.

The practice itself is probably not the issue.

There may be other aspects to the arrangement that could be questionable. For example, what if the agreement was made under threat of having access to Google Maps API removed, or something like that.

When Google was hard-coded as the only choice in iOS, I could see why this might have been an issue. Now however, you can pick other search engines. (I am using Bing as the default search on my iPhone for instance.)
 
nagromme said:
Yep. On desktop and iOS alike, I’d wish to be able to add any search engine I want (even special-purpose like IMDB and Wikipedia, right in the browser itself) to the available list.
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Well, I don't know about Safari (for some reason I keep it updated even though I have never used it), but on Firefox this is very possible. Wikipedia is already built-in to Firefox, there's a plugin specifically for IMDB, and then there's this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-to-search-bar/
 
camnchar said:
Yeah, how about a legal.macrumors.com subdomain or at least a separate blog for the legal stuff?
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It's no different to all the crap "not going to happen in 1 million years" rumours that appear on this website. We're all sick of them but they still appear here. So a sub area for the legal rumours or the crap rumours is not going to happen. Would be nice if it did. But I doubt it'll happen any time soon.
 
wikus said:
I don't see why Apple should be fined for setting Google's search engine as their default. As long as the choice (uh-oh! theres that word again in apple-land) is there to switch to a different one, does it matter?
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Well that argument never worked for Microsoft, so...
 
wikus said:
But is that limitation (again) at the hands of Apple or because other search engines havent attempted to write the code necessary for apple to use theirs? Im thinking in terms of Firefox; you can add any search engine you like, but its up to the search engine to add that functionality to firefox.
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Errrr.... that is HTML code - the very fact that it is a browser makes the Safari in iOS capable of using any search engine. The only thing the little search field in the top righthand corner does is fill the string into the search box. There is a protocol called Gopher for that. So, yes, you can blame Apple for not giving us the choice like in Firefox.
 
If you don't want iOS with Google search you don't have to. You buy an Android with Google search. It's Google's problem not Apple's that Google allowed their search on a platform/OS that is in competition with their own.

Google created the search monopoly not Apple. Apple asked for it. But Google could have said no, Google search is for Android only. But no Google wanted their search on everything.

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wikus said:
The macrumors homepage would be pretty empty then... all Apple's been doing lately is throwing lawsuits against everyone.
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It's a quality vs quantity issue.
 
wikus said:
Sounds like a bidding war by Apple to be on their list for search engines. I think Apple should be paying Google to use their services, not the other way around, lol. Its weird.
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Why should Apple pay Google? If Google are paying 1B to Apple for keeping their status as default search engine on iOS for some period of time, then Google is presumably making (a lot) more than 1B from the arrangement.

If the *aren't* making more than 1B then that's dumping, and probably would be seen as anti-competitive behaviour, hence the investigation.

But why stop at the search engine? Microsoft got in crap for having Internet Explorer for being the default browser, so in that regard, shouldnt there be a similar issue with Safari for those of us who dont want it? I never use it in OS X and would rather see it gone, but I dont think Apple or Microsoft should be forced to not offer their own product alongside another of their own products as default.
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You don't understand anti-trust law. Microsoft didn't get in trouble for bundling IE. They got in trouble for bundling IE at the expense of an already established market. Microsoft performed the class anti-trust violation of using a monopoly in one market to leverage a monopoly in a secondary exiting market. If they'd sold IE at a competitive price, they'd have been fine. If they'd sold copies of windows with IE built in, but at a higher price, they'd have been fine. If Netscape were originally free, or if Netscape simply didn't exist, they probably have been fine. By subsequently using IE as a way of making the web an MS only zone, they pretty much guaranteed they were going to get slapped.
 
It bums me out that Apple takes 1B from Google. First, they don't need it. Second, they allege (and I agree) that Schmidt, while an Apple board member, stole the idea, look and feel of Android from Apple. They are suing a bunch of the Android manufacturers over this allegation. I understand that dealing with Samsung is a business necessity, but I don't think dealing with Google is a business necessity. Not any more.
 
the time to start making a fuss would be when Apple wasn't using Google as the default search engine.

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rosalindavenue said:
It bums me out that Apple takes 1B from Google. First, they don't need it. Second, they allege (and I agree) that Schmidt, while an Apple board member, stole the idea, look and feel of Android from Apple. They are suing a bunch of the Android manufacturers over this allegation. I understand that dealing with Samsung is a business necessity, but I don't think dealing with Google is a business necessity. Not any more.
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totally agree here. Google do seem to get pretty rotten deal sometimes.
 
rosalindavenue said:
It bums me out that Apple takes 1B from Google. First, they don't need it. Second, they allege (and I agree) that Schmidt, while an Apple board member, stole the idea, look and feel of Android from Apple. They are suing a bunch of the Android manufacturers over this allegation. I understand that dealing with Samsung is a business necessity, but I don't think dealing with Google is a business necessity. Not any more.
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Remove all of Google's services from the iPhone and iPad and youre going to piss off a lot of consumers. I wouldn't even bother to use an iOS device if it didnt give options for google search, maps, gmail clients, gmail contacts syncing (if thats even possible in iOS), etc.

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adbe said:
Why should Apple pay Google? If Google are paying 1B to Apple for keeping their status as default search engine on iOS for some period of time, then Google is presumably making (a lot) more than 1B from the arrangement.

If the *aren't* making more than 1B then that's dumping, and probably would be seen as anti-competitive behaviour, hence the investigation.



You don't understand anti-trust law. Microsoft didn't get in trouble for bundling IE. They got in trouble for bundling IE at the expense of an already established market. Microsoft performed the class anti-trust violation of using a monopoly in one market to leverage a monopoly in a secondary exiting market. If they'd sold IE at a competitive price, they'd have been fine. If they'd sold copies of windows with IE built in, but at a higher price, they'd have been fine. If Netscape were originally free, or if Netscape simply didn't exist, they probably have been fine. By subsequently using IE as a way of making the web an MS only zone, they pretty much guaranteed they were going to get slapped.
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I stand corrected. Its going to be pretty interesting how this plays out.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

I've been using Bing for months and I see no noticeable difference in the quality of the results. I sometimes use Google when looking for an image or video since its pretty obvious Bing and Google use very different algos.

I prefer Bing's mobile interfaces where the whole search result is like a button or tile rather than trying to aim for the hyperlink text. All in all, I think any difference between the two is mostly fanboyism.

Here's an example. I wanted to find the laugh face black and white picture meme thing. That's not even the name of the meme. I just searched for Laugh Face.

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Laugh+Face&FORM=BIFD#x0y0

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en...urce=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=MrlfT72iMoPHgAeUguWECA
 
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nagromme said:
Yep. On desktop and iOS alike, I’d wish to be able to add any search engine I want (even special-purpose like IMDB and Wikipedia, right in the browser itself) to the available list.

AND then I’d like iOS to have ability to choose on the fly (like you can on desktop Safari) without having to go to Settings. I know the UI would get crowded, so maybe leave this as a power-user shortcut: tap-hold on the magnifying glass icon, say. Or add a button for this within the as-you-type results.
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What am I missing here I have app's for both wikipedia , and IMDB they work very well why make a mobile browser more cluttered then is needs to be.
 
I have been on the Internet since 1995, since I was a teenager...

In the early days, there were several major search engines, none of which were perfect or gave relevant, properly weighted results. Sometimes you would have to use several search engines together to get the information you were looking for....

Those that I remember most:

• Yahoo
• Altavista (altavista.digital.com)
• Lycos
• Hotbot
• WebCrawler
• Excite

I went to San Francisco in 2000 for the Macworld Expo Conference. The morning of the keynote address, when I was in line waiting to enter the Moscone Center, this guy comes up to me, passing out flyers....he says: "Hey, we have this new start-up, we're a search engine and we're called Google, you should check us out!" This was the first time I had ever heard of Google -- January 5th, 2000. So then I checked out Google later that day and started using it. I was absolutely amazed at the accuracy, relevance, speed, and number of useful/valid results I was getting from this search engine -- Google. I started using Google as my default search engine from that point forward, and have not looked back. I was using this even before Apple put it as the default browser in Safari, or even before Safari was released, for that matter -- I was using Google with Mac OS 9.

All I can say about this, is that Google is the best, fastest, and largest search engine in the world...the database and the algorithms are still better than anything out there. The servers and network that power Google can handle the traffic and never choke up. They sort of do have a 'monopoly' in the search-engine world, but couldn't you say the same thing about Apple and the tablet market? Not one company makes a competitive product to the iPad, and nobody makes a search engine quite like Google. I don't see many people complaining about Google's search engine, because it serves it's purpose, and does a good job at it.

Apple may have "asked" for money from Google as part of the agreement, to allow Google to be featured as the default web browser option on iOS and Apple products (Safari). It is a two way street, Google may have offered, or Apple may have asked...anyhow both parties agreed on a deal and it was done.

Capatalism is a laissez-faire type of affair...a true free market should not be thwarted by a non-capatalistic regulatory system.
 
Glad there's still some authority left. I was afraid Apple might start taxing the government soon from how big they have grown.
 
rosalindavenue said:
It bums me out that Apple takes 1B from Google. First, they don't need it. Second, they allege (and I agree) that Schmidt, while an Apple board member, stole the idea, look and feel of Android from Apple. They are suing a bunch of the Android manufacturers over this allegation. I understand that dealing with Samsung is a business necessity, but I don't think dealing with Google is a business necessity. Not any more.
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To my knowledge, neither Apple nor Steve Jobs himself has ever accused Schmidt of wrongfully using any knowledge he acquired while at the board.
 
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