It's been confirmed that Alphabet, Google's parent company, paid Apple a cool $20 billion in 2022 to ensure that its search engine was the default option in the Safari web browser. The news comes after court documents in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google were unsealed.
The information is key for those who argue that Google's position in the market prevents others from being able to compete, and both Google and Apple had hoped that the $20 billion figure would not be made public knowledge.
Apple had already confirmed that Google paid it billions of dollars but refused to specify a number, although Google had said that the company pays 36% of the revenue it earns from its search ads to Apple, a figure that suggested a considerable amount of money was changing hands.
The default option
The court document disclosure was first reported by Bloomberg and will come as a blow to Google's legal team, but also Apple's executives. The documents mean that we also know how vital Google's payments are to Apple — Bloomberg notes that the payments in 2020 accounted for 17.5% of Apple's operating income alone.
Google and Apple have been working together to make Google the default search engine since 2002, but having initially agreed to a deal in which no money changed hands, an ad revenue-sharing system was devised. However, Google isn't the only company that wants its search engine to be the go-to for iPhone owners. Microsoft has been trying to get Bing into the hearts and minds of Apple users for some time, and a Microsoft exec even went so far as to say Apple is the reason Google is beating Bing in popularity.
There have also been rumors of Apple's one-time intention to buy Bing, but a deal was never struck in part due to the revenue Google was already providing Apple. It was decided that losing that revenue simply wasn't worth the benefit of owning a search engine.
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