It appears in the "Services" category along with things such as the App Store, advertising, Apple Pay, Apple Card, AppleCare, subscription products like TV+, News+, Fitness+, Music, Arcade, and iCloud.
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Google and Apple's Search Engine Deal Violates Antitrust Law
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It appears in the "Services" category along with things such as the App Store, advertising, Apple Pay, Apple Card, AppleCare, subscription products like TV+, News+, Fitness+, Music, Arcade, and iCloud.
Services. Largest part of that income for Apple or certainly close to it.
It already is for me.....80% of the time I use copilot and it 10x better than any support on a product site and better at general search.
Few use AI for that but if more tried it - google would be toast.
I'd love to see some sources on this. When you mention total traffic, I assume you mean worldwide.
Best I can figure, iOS has between 30-40% market share worldwide, MacOS has between 10-15% marketshare worldwide. In both cases, they are not the majority, so it stands to reason that it would be tough for these devices to be doing the majority of the google searches. I could be wrong though and would love to see the data pointing otherwise.
Yea, i mean i just dont get it. I dont know many people who are screaming from the rooftops that google is such a terrible search provider and that they think it's unfair that google pays apple to be the default search engine. Especially with the fact that anybody, at any time can change their search engine choices on their iOS or Android devices with a couple of swipes.
I love the gov't standing up for the consumer, when the consumer isn't asking for any help.
But hey, they can't seem to spend our tax dollars appropriately, so we need to have them find fault with big business and levy a few billion in fines...
It appeared to be free money but it never was. The "free money" was considered in other antitrust rulings against Apple. It helped build cases against Apple and Google that they both will be fighting for years to come. There is no such thing as free money when lawyers, regulators and competitors are all competing for that money.
I think there's a difference between favorite and default. I never heard complaints about Google years ago, but I constantly hear tech people complaining about poor search results and overwhelming ads. I use Google exclusively but I don't think about it. I'm just using the default that's good enough for me. But some of these new AI LLMs are much better aligned for search and getting users to their right destinations. I will be shifting my default search very soon. Google is in for a world of hurt (and actual competition) over the next few years.
I know its not quite on the same level and utility to the general public, but Coke / Pepsi / Gatorade and others all pay MLB, NBA, NHL and so on, hundreds of millions of dollars to be the "official drink of..." for their marketing and profiting purposes in order to shove diabetes in a can down our throats, but google can't be the "official search engine" of apple.....got it.
I de-Googled all my devices. Kinda goes against the whole “monopoly” idea to be able to remove apps and defaults…
What country has such a government? And how do I become a citizen?
Partially correct and partially incorrect. In this case, consumers do have access to other search engines that, in many people's opinion are better, cost them less, or in this case, costs them nothing at all to switch to and are not barred from doing said switch.
I don't see how google, paying apple to be their search engine of choice impacts the statement below.... Especially the bold.
A monopoly is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing. This contrasts with a monopsony which relates to a single entity's control of a market to purchase a good or service, and with oligopoly and duopoly which consists of a few sellers dominating a market. Monopolies are thus characterised by a lack of economic competition to produce the good or service, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit. The verb monopolise or monopolize refers to the process by which a company gains the ability to raise prices or exclude competitors. In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises
For me, i dont hear the majority of consumers screaming from the roof tops that they hate googles dominant postion as a search engine and that they are stuck with it, bc of googles payments to apple and therefore demand gov't intervention to prohibit said deal between apple and google.
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I think Microsoft would definitely like to see Bing as the default on Safari and reportedly even tried in the past but was "outbid" by Google. If Google were out of the picture, Microsoft likely wouldn’t feel the need to pay at/near Google levels. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
This isn't about advertising being illegal. The government isn't stopping Google from running ads in the App Store, running ads on television, etc.
The ruling was about a dominant company making substantial payments to be the coveted pre-set default on various browsers in order to maintain or increase its dominance. This created increased barriers in the market by unfairly limiting the visibility of competitors.
Apple would still have to do that regardless of the deal with Google.
Not necessarily at the same level and there wouldn’t be nearly the incentive to do so. If default search payments ended up going away, there's less reason and justification to spend as much money on Safari.
The significant Google payments very likely pushed Apple to spend more on Safari than they would’ve otherwise and that "more" is not "nothing."
Someone would file a lawsuit against Apple nonetheless and given the way the courts are today would probably have a fair chance of succeeding. Especially in the EU.
Google and Apple are competitors so your analogy makes no sense at all. That's why it was kept a secret and only revealed in leaks and court documents through discovery. You're asking Coke to sponsor a Pepsi event as the official drink of choice.
I disagree; there is a massive incentive for Apple to keep their in-house browser in top-notch functionality... consider their large loyal user base, plus the integration with iOS. I do not think Safari is any better than the alternatives, yet I still use it simply because it is integrated in my other devices while still doing its job, and it is also more power efficient than Chromium-based software.
Completely speculative...
I do not think Microsoft is interested in being a default search engine. I think this Bing project was initially to take on Google monopoly of the search market but so far it has failed IMO. hardly heard someone say "I will use bing because its better".
I hate Google but I see no antitrust going on here. You can easily switch search engine no locking in. If the calculations are correct, Google is paying $20/apple user a year which is ludicrous high which makes you wonder how much of our data they sell to advertisers.
DDG is just a Bing wrapper
btw, if you want google results with better privacy use Startpage.com (wrapper for Google)
100% correct. Apple was certainly aware of the risk as I'm sure multiple execs were involved in the negotiations to maintain this deal over the years....We are talking $20B! People are dumb. Now what I don't understand is whether they can equally bid access to the search bar among Bing, Google (say 10b each). Assuming that would also be anti-competitive given the shear size of spend limiting others.
The sources I see are closer to 50%. But it's revenue so Apple users are generally spending more money than Android which could account for the slight majority in the global numbers.
Google isn't paying for all traffic from "Apple devices", it's paying specifically for traffic from Safari. Safari only has around 18% to 20% share of the global browser market.