Google Reportedly Paid Apple As Much As $12 Billion To Be The iPhone’s Default Search

If you were to launch Safari on your iPhone or iPad and type a search query into the address bar, there’s a very, very good chance that it will default to Google. Sure, some of you might have set it differently, but for many, Google is more or less the default, and it turns out that Google paid Apple billions to keep it that way.

While we have heard in the past that Google has paid Apple to keep it as the default search engine in the past, we now know how much they paid for it. This is according to figures from the US Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, where court documents have revealed that Google paid anywhere between $8 billion to $12 billion.

Google is currently facing a lawsuit by the Justice Department over alleged antitrust practices, and this payment to Apple is one such example. According to University of Miami law professor, John Newman, who was also a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer, “This isn’t classic collusion, where two rivals agree to raise prices and each benefits. It looks more like one monopolist agreeing with another company to split the monopoly rent.”

Search engine DuckDuckGo claims that as a result of Google’s practices, about 2% of searches only happen on their platform. The company’s CEO believes that if users had the option of setting DuckDuckGo as the preferred search engine, that number could jump to 20%.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones, General
Tags: Google, iPhone, Legal