“Microsoft cannot convince Apple to use Bing for any amount”: Controversial speech of Google’s antitrust court

The verdict of Google’s antitrust case, which was published on Monday, has a very heavy volume. Judge Amit Mehta He was in charge of reviewing and announcing the factual and legal findings of the said case, and the said ruling includes hundreds of pages of factual findings and even legal conclusions, which turned into a 286-page document full of footnotes, edits, and graphic diagrams.

Google pays Apple billions of dollars annually to keep Safari as the default search engine. By the way Eddie Q, Apple’s senior vice president of services, there is no meaningful alternative to Google. “Microsoft can’t pay Apple to use Bing as the default search engine for Safari,” he told the Internet search giant’s antitrust court.

“I don’t think there is any price in the world that Microsoft can offer us,” Q continued. They were willing to make Bing available to us for free. They could even give us their entire company.”

Q’s words show that Google has maintained its position as the default search engine for Safari; Of course, for this purpose, he pays a huge fee to Apple. According to Ghazi Mehta, the market reality is that Google is the only real choice for the default search engine (GSE).

In addition to the deal with Apple, Google has also made deals with mobile phone carriers and smartphone manufacturers to be the default search engine for Android devices. These contracts work a little differently; Because they depend on Google’s control over the Play Store.

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Apart from Apple, many other companies in the Fortune 500 list prefer to use Google as the default search engine for their products, and in fact, with the current situation, they have no other choice.

Judge Mehta wrote in his ruling: “Google knows that there is no real competition for its default position in browsers and smartphones; Because its partners cannot use another service. Google partners have repeatedly come to the conclusion that changing the default search engine or trying to be more flexible in the field of search is not financially feasible; Because it means losing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars that Google pays them as revenue share.

According to the court ruling, Google will pay Apple a percentage of its net advertising revenue, which will reach $20 billion in 2022, in exchange for Safari being the default search engine. By comparison, that’s double what the internet search giant paid the iPhone maker in 2020, when it accounted for 17.5 percent of Apple’s operating profit.

Google and Apple signed their current agreement in 2016. Their cooperation goes back to the distant past; But it was then that Apple introduced the Suggestions feature. For example, when you type something in Spotlight and Apple suggests a website, that suggestion isn’t actually based on a Google search.

The introduction of the Suggestions feature had a huge impact on the number of Google visitors. According to one of Google’s analysis, the aforementioned feature caused the company’s search engine traffic to decrease by 10 to 15 percent from Safari, and its revenue from the iOS version of Safari to decrease by 4 to 10 percent. The 2016 contract included clauses to avoid this problem and to ensure that the Suggestions feature does not affect Google’s incoming traffic.

The terms of the 2016 deal have been successful for both Google and Apple. The two companies extended the agreement in 2021 and it will expire in 2026. Apple can unilaterally extend this agreement for two years, and if both parties agree, it is possible to extend the contract until 2031.

According to Judge Mehta, it will be very difficult for Apple to enter the search engine market, and it is not surprising that both Google and Apple companies have studied this issue and presented their estimates in court.

According to Apple’s estimates, running a public search engine (GSE) will cost $6 billion annually. The company has already spent heavily on developing its search capabilities. Meanwhile, Google estimated in late 2020 that it would cost Apple about $20 billion to build and maintain a search engine that could compete with its own.