They could build a search engine that was actually privacy focussed rather than talking about privacy and then doing everything they can to defend the small fortune they make out of the Google surveillance machine.
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Apple Wants to Help Google Defend Search Engine Deal Worth Billions
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They could build a search engine that was actually privacy focussed rather than talking about privacy and then doing everything they can to defend the small fortune they make out of the Google surveillance machine.
Well most of the shareholders don't have any real interest in the company to start with. This is just a money-making venture for them. Some likely don't even know they are invested (they are paying into a fund of some sort that is managed by someone else). If Apple falls in their product quality and people leave for elsewhere, they will too.
I don’t think it would be “extreme” to force Goog to sell Chrome. Did you editorialize on purpose there, Juli, or just rushing this article out the door?
Apple wants to defend its multi-billion dollar search engine deal with Google, which is in danger because Google has been found guilty of violating antitrust law. Apple has asked the court handling Google's lawsuit with the U.S. government for an emergency stay [PDF], so that Apple has time to intervene and plead its case before a remedy is decided on.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Google for anti-competitve behavior in the search market way back in 2020, and after a lengthy legal battle, the DoJ won. A main component of the lawsuit was Google's deal with Apple, which sees Google pay billions annually to be the default search engine for Safari. The court decided that the agreement between Apple and Google violated antitrust law, and is a major reason Google has been able to maintain its search engine monopoly.
The U.S. government asked the court to bar Google from entering into contracts with Apple, among other restrictions, and that will cost Apple a lot of money. In 2022, for example, Google paid Apple $20 billion. Apple already asked the court to allow it to be more involved in the case as remedies are decided on, and the court denied the request due to timing. Apple appealed the decision, and is asking for a stay while the appeal plays out.
Apple says that because its deal with Google is at stake, it deserves a right to participate, and without a stay, it will "suffer clear and substantial irreparable harm."
In addition to prohibiting deals between Apple and Google, the U.S. Department of Justice also has more extreme remedies in mind, including forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser and uncoupling Android from other products like Google Search and the Google Play Store. Google has a lot to defend against, and will prioritize Chrome over its deal with Apple.
When initially asking to take a larger role in the case, Apple said that Google "can no longer adequately represent Apple's interests" because of the wide scope of the case. Unsurprisingly, the DoJ does not want Apple involved in the remedies portion of the trial, which is set to start in April.
If the court decides that Google can't pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari, Apple would still have to offer Google Search as an option in some capacity, but would not be able to continue to collect money for doing so.
Article Link: Apple Wants to Help Google Defend Search Engine Deal Worth Billions
If probably costs Apple a couple thousand dollars on administrative minutia per year. So, ROI is on the order of magnitude of 1 billion percent. Of course, that plummets to an order of magnitude of only 100,000% once expensive lawyers get involved. IOW, the numbers here are crazy.
Your observation that you use GPT is the key one here. We are in the process of having search engines replaced by a new technology. Even if we grant that Google has had a monopoly by dint of this deal with Apple -- which I do not -- that advantage is now being eliminated by market competition from AI.
This is a key issue with antitrust in the age of exponential technology growth. By the time governments identify, build, and prosecute a case against a monopoly, the conditions of the market may have changed to the point that the intervention is either unnecessary or ineffective. The government can only act after a monopoly has been established for a long enough period of time that it doesn’t appear to be just a temporary fluctuation in the market. Nowadays, due to the pace of growth, by the time the government can act and prosecute, technology has already advanced to a point that the monopoly is being broken by competition from innovative competitors.
We've seen this multiple times now. AI started to replace search engines even while the DoJ argued against search-engine monopolies. Internet Explorer had already been eclipsed by Firefox, with Chrome on the rise by the time the EU forced Microsoft to allow a different default browser, not to mention that desktop browsers were rapidly being eclipsed by mobile-computing browsers. In more recent years, Facebook was seen to be a rising monopoly in social media, particularly after its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. By the time the government started considering action to break up Facebook, TikTok was already disrupting the market.
Ultimately, antitrust enforcement in the digital age risks being either too late to matter or unnecessary altogether. If legal action cannot match the speed of technological change, market forces become the only truly effective check on monopoly power.
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HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
It's FRIDAY!!! Time for the weekly Apple competitor brand name image in article... like Netflix last week.
In this corner, the owner of Android, the maker of Chrome, the creator of Maps, Search engine masters of the world: Google
And in this corner... wait... where's Apple??? The anticipated opponent has moved around to be in the SAME corner WITH Google???
Now that's something you don't often see. I guess we should expect 300-500 posts of competitor like/love this time.
In this corner, the owner of Android, the maker of Chrome, the creator of Maps, Search engine masters of the world: Google
And in this corner... wait... where's Apple??? The anticipated opponent has moved around to be in the SAME corner WITH Google???
Now that's something you don't often see. I guess we should expect 300-500 posts of competitor like/love this time.
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The dividends aren't even that good. S&P 500 dividends are about 3x what Apple does per dollar invested.
IDK what Apple does with the money but paying dividends is an unusually small part of it.
I mean, they were LITERALLY THE FIRST to create a good search engine. Prior, there was what, web crawler that couldn't find itself in a box?
Then consider how long it took competitors to get to market and how far behind they all were. I think there is a vast difference in punishing a company for being best and the most experienced vs. monopoly.
What innovation to search did Yahoo or Microsoft ever produce? Not much... people don't use Bing because it's terrible. People didn't use Yahoo because it was terrible.
If you don't like ad tracking, use Duck Duck Go (which is still using Google search). If there's anything that DOJ could maybe really fault them for its privacy and usage of data.... they're taking things to an extreme level, imo.
DOJ often sues not understanding what they're suing about - look what they did to the real estate industry? No if you want to buy a house, you have to fork out a commission to your agent and have a contract for them to show you a house. That isn't making housing cheaper. They muck up most things they get involved in...what's the saying? The road to hell was paved with good intentions.
Apple also is vested not just for the $$$, but if they are creating precedence that bundled services, software, hardware, and search are monopolisitic form Google... what do you think they'd do to Apple who is 3000 times worse? (Google is at least open with most things, unlike Apple.). Then again, Tim Cook did get out his knee pads and kissed the ring of the orange one so Apple is likely safe for a few years.
DDG is using a mix of it's own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and Bing. It's not using Google.
If you search DDG with a !g bang, it will switch to Google.
Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from? - DuckDuckGo Help Pages
DuckDuckGo is an independent internet privacy company that offers a private alternative to Google search & Chrome in one free app.
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It is anti-competitive behaviour. What is Apple's problem? The "most admirable" company should know better.
Google is a horrid search engine, IMO.
If you want a one-sided politicized response to everything use Google.
I avoid it all at costs.
How do you know - have you seen the code? As far as I can see, it's simply setting one of the 5 engines (at least in Safari for macOS) as the default. So maybe there's a single line somewhere in the Safari code that creates that combo box with the 5 engine "objects" and in the next line of code, there's a "if (google is Paid up) setDefault(googleEngine)". With the verdict, just remove that line
Would a ruling against Google prevent Apple from asking Microsoft for a similar deal to set Bing as default?
I quit using Google search altogether when they started force-feeding AI into their results.
I'm 100% DDG now.
I like google better. And if Bing were set to default, I would change it.
Maybe Google Search has too much control, but so does Google Chrome. Google is paying to have Google search be the default search engine on Firefox, which is providing the Firefox team with a lot of funding.
Stopping funding from Google to Firefox isn't going to do much to hurt Google Search popularity when Chrome has an 80% marketshare. It will hurt Firefox more than it hurts Google Search.
Stopping funding from Google to Firefox isn't going to do much to hurt Google Search popularity when Chrome has an 80% marketshare. It will hurt Firefox more than it hurts Google Search.
So stupid. If two businesses want to make a deal to work together, who cares? It's not like Apple is making Google the only option. Most people say, "Well, most people use the default app". Yeah, that's because it's Google and it's the best search engine. You actually find what you're looking for by using it. Unlike Bing, where you can ask it the size of a tiger and you get results on flowers or something.
Prior to Google there was Altavista. Altavista was a great search engine. DEC would still be around today had its management understood the value of Altavista. Unfortunately, its fate was sealed and it was treated with neglect by its subsequent owners (Compaq, Overture, and finally Yahoo!). It is an odd twist of fate that Xoogler Marissa Meyer was the CEO of Yahoo! when it shutdown Altavista.
The rest of that work is done. Didn’t you know you can already switch to a different search engine? Google’s paying to be the DEFAULT, not the ONLY.