The antitrust trial that Google faces in the United States is the most important legal challenge in decades for a Big Tech. The process is putting Google’s privileged position in the search engine market in check, and is allowing everything to be revealed. type of data about how the company has achieved that position. Its agreements with Apple have become one of the key points of the process, and although truly surprising data had already been revealed about the size of that alliance, we now know that in reality the matter has even more substance.
Even more money. Data revealed in the trial already indicated that Google was paying Apple between 8,000 and 12,000 million dollars a year to be able to place its search engine as the default option on the iPhone and in Safari on both mobile devices and Macs. Other sources They talk about Google paying $18 billion in 2021 alone. Now Bloomberg indicates that Kevin Murphy, a professor at the University of Chicago, revealed that Google also pays Apple 36% of what it earns from advertising that appears in searches in Safari. And the question, of course, is, how much money is that?
Thousands of millions. It’s hard to know because the specific ad revenue figure on Safari is unknown. As indicated in Engadget, taking into account that in 2022 Google earned $224 billion from advertising, Apple would receive “tens of billions of dollars” for that agreement. This data, they claim sources covering the trial, is the largest leak of the entire process.
At Google they wrinkle their nose. Google lawyer John Schmidtlein “visibly cringed” when that information was revealed. The company had attempted to keep that information secret because otherwise it would “unreasonably harm Google’s competitive position relative to both its competitors and other parties.”
Pay to master. The argument of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) is forceful here: Google pays enormous amounts of money to block competition and lock users tied to its services. In September an Apple executive testified that the deal with Google was so lucrative that it caused Apple to halt development of its own search engine. Yet that project, called “Pegasus,” appears to be underway regardless.
For the interest I love you andres. It is difficult to know how much money Google dedicates to these types of agreements, but it was revealed that in 2021 it dedicated $26 billion in agreements to place its default search engine on devices and browsers of various strategic allies such as Google, Samsung or Microsoft.
Having your search engine everywhere is very expensive. Added to that amount are those additional agreements that, as in the case of Apple, mean that a good piece of the advertising pie also ends up going to those companies. Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, estimated that Google will probably dedicate to these types of alliances “at least 90,000 million of its current annual revenues”, which in 2022 were 279,800 million dollars.
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