e has 19 billion reason not to build Google Search rival/
Apple does not plan to launch its own search engine that will compete with Google.
Bloomberg reports that Eddy Cue is Apple’s Senior Vice-President of Services and will testify in the federal antitrust case, that Apple has no plans to launch an “Apple Search”, because its partnership with Google benefits its customers better.
Cue was a key player in ‘s successful negotiation of Apple’s multi-billion dollar deal with Google. The deal took four months to complete, and required “working every day”.
Why we care. The U.S. Justice Department claims that Google’s agreement with Apple, to be the default search engine for its products, has created an unfair search environment by preventing rival search engines from competing seriously. The testimony from Cue, which Apple tried to block per Reuters, provides a significant insight into Google’s relationship with Apple.
Apple’s agreement with Google. Google has an agreement with Apple that pays around $10 billion per year to be its default search engine. Google also pays Apple advertising revenues, which are one of its biggest costs.
Apple categorizes its Google income as advertising revenue under its Services division. The sales for Apple’s fiscal 2022 amounted $78.1 billion.
According to Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, Google could pay Apple up to $19 billion in this fiscal year.
Why Google was chosen as Apple’s default Search Engine. Cue will testify that Apple selected Google because it is the most effective search engine. Cue will also say that Apple has financial agreements with other search engines, such as Yahoo and Microsoft Bing. DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and DuckDuckGo are all included. Cue will also claim that Apple users who have Google as their default engine can change it easily, echoing the comments made by John Schmidtlein, Google’s attorney.
DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg, however, told a court last week changing the default search engine was “way more difficult than it should be”.
- If you don’t do anything, you will be switched to Google if some of the defaults are changed.
Who else has been called to testify? Cue is the second Apple executive to testify after pple AI chief (and former Google executive), John Giannandrea, last week. Giannandrea gave the majority of his testimony in a closed-door courtroom, so details are not public.
What did Google say? John Schmidtlein is the lead lawyer at Google. He claims that the company has a 90% market share in search because of its superior product, not because they have financial deals which give their rivals unfair advantages. It highlights Microsoft’s Bing being included by default on Windows, which does not help Bing’s position in the market.
Google Antitrust Trial Updates to keep up with the latest developments.
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