Shop E Store iPhones and iPads may have different default search engines as Google seeks to honor its $20 billion annual contract with Apple, a court filing claims.
Google’s annual payments to Apple for Safari’s default search engine appear certain to be banned under antitrust laws, but the search giant is fighting back with a number of counterproposals.
Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year
When you perform a web search by typing a query in the integrated Safari bar, your search will be performed in Google (unless you manually change the default). That’s because Google pays Apple billions of dollars each year for that privilege.
This is a big advantage for Google. That’s because Google gets a lot of search traffic from Apple users, which allows it to place ads in front of them. Apple customers are also a particularly valuable demographic for advertisers, thanks to the fact that they have higher-than-average incomes.
This is also very advantageous for Apple as it is free money. Defaults need to be set, and Google is the most popular search engine, so the company probably will do it anyway.
The exact amount has not been disclosed and Apple hides it within its services revenue, but an antitrust lawsuit against Google led to the 2022 numbers being incorrectly released. The amount was $20 billion.
The Justice Department argued, and a court agreed in the summer, that the payments were illegal because they gave Google an unfair advantage over smaller search engines. The Justice Department asked the judge to ban the payments for 10 years.
Google submits counterproposal regarding default search engine
As part of the legal process, Google has the right to file counter-proposals with the Department of Justice, and is currently filing counter-proposals.
Google accepts that the deal with Apple will be barred, but insists it should be for three years instead of 10. The company says the tech industry is undergoing rapid change, especially with the rise of generative AI as a new form of search, and the fact that it currently dominates the industry doesn’t mean it will continue to do so.
iPhone and iPad may have different search engines
The company also suggested that more flexibility could allow other search services to compete with Google for Apple’s business. One particularly bizarre proposal claims that the iPhone and iPad could have different default search engines, suggesting that Google would bid on one and its competitors would bid on the other.
Our proposal will allow browsers to continue to bring Google Search to their users and earn money from that partnership. But it also provides additional flexibility. Allows for multiple default agreements across different platforms (such as different default search engines for iPhone and iPad) and browsing modes, as well as the ability to change the default search provider at least every 12 months.
9to5Mac’s opinion
Google owns the search industry for now, but the company also has a strong argument that its dominance won’t last forever. We are already seeing people using AI services like ChatGPT as an alternative to traditional search engines, but it is certainly difficult to predict what will happen in the future.
For example, before the iPhone was released, Nokia essentially owned the smartphone industry. It was unimaginable for the company to exit the business, but just seven years later, the company actually exited the smartphone market. So, while Google seems safe now, its future dominance is far from guaranteed.
In theory, by making the default search deal more granular, it becomes more realistic for competing search engines to bid for a piece of the pie. But Apple is all about providing a consistent experience across devices, so the idea of making a deal to offer different search engines on the iPhone and iPad is frankly foolish.
There may be room for compromise in the court’s ruling, and there’s a good chance that Google will succeed in easing the proposed 10-year ban, but it’s certain that over the next few years, Apple will It will incur a loss of billions of dollars.
Photo by Brandon Romanchuk on Unsplash
(Tag Translation)iPhone
