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Google Pays Apple $18B to $20B a Year to Be Default iOS Search Engine
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Not one bit? If PETA held a convention and gave a cheesesteak restaurant the most prominent booth in the vendor food section, would you not find that incongruous for an organization like PETA? How is what Apple is doing regarding default search that much different especially given how much Cook/Apple have spoken out against Google's data collection and privacy policies?
How do you split up Google’s search? You could strip it of all its other businesses and it would still have 90% or their income.
Break up their advertising business (Search Ads vs Display ads). End their agreements with android manufactures to pre-install Google Play Services on almost all android devices.
Fwiw, it took me over a month to get used to DDG. Now I can't go back. Google is corrupted bloatware in its search as far as I can tell now.
That's a bit black and white, don't you think? It's not like Apple forces you to use Google, but rather it's set as the default which you can easily change at any time.
If your privacy is important to you - as it is for me - chances are high you'll understand which search engine to use.
And if you don't, it's unlikely you understand much about privacy anyway.
For $20 billion, I find this a pretty decent tradeoff to make even though I am as pro privacy as anyone.
If I were Apple, I would keep milking this for as long as possible. It shows also this is a zero sum game for Google. They own search and they also compete with Apple in the phone business. Thats why I think it was the biggest stupid decision Satya Nadella made for leaving the phone business. He should have stayed the course, the apps would have eventually come and Bing would have some traction.
Most of it's income is from advertising. The advertising in search is clicks and that is not 90% as Youtube brings in a lot also.
I agree and it took me a while as well (a few years in fact, lol), but quite often I know exactly what I’m searching for and DuckDuckGo doesn’t find it.
Also DDG should be set up to rank Wikipedia and Wiktionary higher for example.
And sometimes it delivers completely unrelated stuff. As if it could not find what you asked it and then it thought “okay let me just show you anything”
And how is this going to protect users? Why is my hard earned money going into supporting this nonsense? Sounds like another narcissist govt official trying to make a name for themselves. If a better search engine comes along, people will use it and force that change. The market is pretty fluid like that. Wintel seemed indomitable… until iPhone destroyed that duopoly. Apple and Google are sleepwalking so it’s only a matter of time before something comes along that will dismantle their duopoly.
Apple charges only $99 per year to be a developer. The commission is not just for monetary transaction. Apple build XCode and all the APIs that developers use for their apps.
A high flat fee makes no sense and kills small independent developers.
This is what I’m wondering. I think the most recent reports put “Services” at $21 billion. If the Google payment is factored into there, that’s $1 billion services without Google. And most recently, “Services” was a quarter of Apple’s business.
Approximately, although some user search activities may be more "valuable" than others depending on country, type of device being used, etc. In the U.S., for example, Safari browser share ranges from around 20% (desktop) to 52% (mobile).
Officials are just trying to do their job to promote more open competition and discourage anticmpetitive behavior among "dominant" companies. A potential way to do that here would be to not let a company (Apple) continue be paid to use its dominance in one area (most popular mobile browser, second most popular desktop browser in the U.S.) to help another company (Google) maintain or increase its dominance in another area (search). A second would be to not let a dominant company (Google with search) continue to pay another (Apple) to stay out of a particular market (search). It's up to the DOJ to make its case that one or both of these antitrust violations are going on and should be stopped.
Apple's very smart to price their products for top 20% of the global market.
They get the most profit of any product & service.
Least likely to be harassed by anti-trust allegations.
Once they exceed 50% + 1 of any country's market then problems arise.
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I wonder what the data is on how many people only use google because it is the default. On all of my devices (namely looking at you, windows), I actively choose Google over anything else. If the default was set to something like Bing, what percentage of iPhone users would stop using Google as their search engine?
The most recent $21 billion Apple services revenue figure was for one quarter. Assuming that the Google payment is spread out to some degree throughout the year, about $5 billion ($20 billion divided by four quarters) of that $21 billion would be the Google payment.