Google put an eleven-figure price tag on being the go-to search tool on Apple’s Safari browser.
Court documents from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google reveal that company parent Alphabet paid the iPhone maker $20 billion in 2022 to be its default search engine, Bloomberg reports. The disclosure, made by Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue, was the first confirmation of the exact dollar figure paid by Google to maintain its search engine dominance on the browser. The New York Times had previously reported that Google paid Apple about $18 billion in 2021 to keep Google’s search engine as the default option on iPhones.
Antitrust and adaptation
Google’s relationship with Apple, which is at the center of the lawsuit, has proven to run particularly deep. The filings also reveal that in 2020, Google’s payments to Apple made up 17.5% of the company’s operating income — no small slice of Apple’s cash flow.
The Department of Justice and several U.S. states filed its lawsuit against Google in 2020, accusing the tech giant of building an illegal monopoly in the search engine and advertising markets, primarily through multi-billion dollar deals paid out to browser companies, like Apple and others. Google has maintained that people use its search engine because it’s a useful product.
After three years, the trial began in September, with concluding arguments slated for Thursday and Friday.
The unsealed documents also show that Apple was fielding several potentially lucrative proposals for its browser’s coveted default slot: Microsoft offered Apple 90% of its advertising revenue in 2020 to make its search engine, Bing, Safari’s default, Bloomberg reported.
Google had a search engine market share of almost 92% as of February, according to data from Oberlo. Its share hasn’t dropped below 90% since 2014, and it has been the top search engine for the better part of two decades.
But Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google who oversees search, ads, commerce, payments, and other key areas, warned employees last week that times have changed for the search giant. The company, he added, needs to “twitch faster” to adapt to the new market.