Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet:
OAKLAND, Calif. — When Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the chief executives of Apple and Google, were photographed eating dinner together in 2017 at an upscale Vietnamese restaurant called Tamarine, the picture set off a tabloid-worthy frenzy about the relationship between the two most powerful companies in Silicon Valley.
As the two men sipped red wine at a window table inside the restaurant in Palo Alto, their companies were in tense negotiations to renew one of the most lucrative business deals in history: an agreement to feature Google's search engine as the preselected choice on Apple's iPhone and other devices. The updated deal was worth billions of dollars to both companies and cemented their status at the top of the tech industry's pecking order.
Now, the partnership is in jeopardy. Last Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a landmark lawsuit against Google — the U.S. government's biggest antitrust case in two decades — and homed in on the alliance as a prime example of what prosecutors say are the company's illegal tactics to protect its monopoly and choke off competition in web search.
The scrutiny of the pact, which was first inked 15 years ago and has rarely been discussed by either company, has highlighted the special relationship between Silicon Valley's two most valuable companies — an unlikely union of rivals that regulators say is unfairly preventing smaller companies from flourishing.
[...] Apple and Google are joined at the hip even though Mr. Cook has said internet advertising, Google's bread and butter, engages in "surveillance" of consumers and even though Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, once promised "thermonuclear war" on his Silicon Valley neighbor when he learned it was working on a rival to the iPhone.
[...] Nearly half of Google's search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department, and the prospect of losing the Apple deal has been described as a "code red" scenario inside the company. When iPhone users search on Google, they see the search ads that drive Google's business. They can also find their way to other Google products, like YouTube.
[...] The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world's internet searches, the center of consumers' online lives.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinnia Zirconium on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:24PM (4 children)
Where's Facebook in this story. Don't you know the Facebook is the entire internet.
Also if Google is so very preselected for me then why is DDG the default on my iPhone.
Also also why do I ignore my default choice of DDG so often that Siri recommends Ecosia to me.
Haha! I laugh at your claim of Google controlling the internet or my iPhone.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 28 2020, @02:17PM
You, Zirconium, are atypical. The Big Three is all of the internet to typical users. My wife, for instance, never closes her Chrome browser, especially not her Facebook tab. Default search for her is Google, and she isn't about to change it. Ditto with her phone, although the phone gets rebooted more often than her computer does. Most of her news is channeled through Facebook, unless I send her a link to something that Facebook "censors".
Just because a half million Americans are atypical doesn't mean that the Big Three don't enjoy monopoly status.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @07:25PM
What's amazing is that the government wants to go after Google for anti-competitive behavior yet they want to destroy net neutrality in the name of being free market capitalist. Which is it, are they free market capitalists or do they want more government intervention?
Because as far as I can tell the destruction of net neutrality is far more destructive to consumers than Google allegedly is. Yet they are going after Google.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday October 28 2020, @10:51PM (1 child)
Google search being a default option used by large numbers of people strikes me as a very weak basis for charging them with anticompetitive behavior. I worry that the whole thing will be busy work for lawyers that ultimately goes nowhere (perhaps by design).
I'm much more concerned about goog's recrapcha and spying shit being splattered all over half the world's websites. (Maybe I'd be concerned about their deals with android phone makers too, if I had ever used one.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2020, @01:44PM
I'm much more concerned about the fact that cable now costs a fortune and is overloaded with commercials. Plus your cable companies are also your Internet companies and there is little competition. That's what the government should be going after because that's what's harming consumers. Not Google.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:59PM
the DOJ is miffed that they are beating up on little old Microsoft.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 28 2020, @03:05PM (2 children)
160 years ago, control meant slavery - ownership and denial of right to travel, to choose to work or not, self determination in basically all ways including being put to death at the option/whim of your owner.
145 years later, control now means delivering consumer electronics with a default setting. I mean, sure, the behavioral impact of that default choice is worth billions per year (in a global market of 750 million users), but... is it really anywhere within 6 orders of magnitude of slavery? It might take 2 minutes for someone to use Google to search for how to change their default browser away from Google - not nearly the same as being sold to the plantation owner.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @05:52PM
Because all those other things you list, the populace has already lost to the bureaucrats. What "self determination" do you have left in the cowed new COVIDy world? Do tell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2020, @09:00PM
Give me a fucking break. Not everything is about fucking slavery.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by legont on Wednesday October 28 2020, @03:54PM
My messages a censored by the admins
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday October 28 2020, @04:53PM (1 child)
Let's be honest here, if the DOJ were to force browser and device makers to offer up a search engine choice when first used, 90%+ of people will pick Google anyway. There honestly isn't even a reason for Google to pay Apple really other than to keep them from setting the default to Bing or some other company. Other than forcing users to not use Google (remove Google from the choices and prevent it from being set manually?), I'm not sure how you fix that. Break Google search up into baby Googles maybe? They each fork the current search engine and go off on their own from there?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 28 2020, @05:13PM
Exactly. The behaviorists can predict just how much that default selection is worth, because so many people will just accept it rather than taking the effort to express a preference for themselves. In a market with nearly a billion users, it translates to billions of dollars a year of real value, so why wouldn't Google pay Apple some high percentage of that guaranteed value? It does, also, act to increase the Google brand value by virtue of the increased market share - which is a monopolistic result, but where to draw the line?
Once a company gains 51% market share, are they obligated to step back and encourage outside competition? Not according to their shareholder obligations. Even if they are obligated by law to curtail their own monopoly, what's the market share limit at which this obligation would kick in? 51%, 34%, 26%? How obligated are they to encourage and enable their competitors? Does that include overseas competitors?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @06:16PM
if you can get 1 cent from 1 million people everyday, that's 10'000. for a year that's 3'650'000 ... wiered.
-
anyways, i suspect that if you don't delete your google cookies that a super-lightweight virtual state machine gets spun up JUST FOR YOU
and it contains all your "stuff".
doing more searches expands your "bubble" (which hocks into the already existing and vast search database but you don't get results from unless it's accessed from a "userID:bubble") ...
i suppose this is why a few years back google searches results became "bad" and (for me) remained so because i delete my cookies on browser close (and turn off computer)
i once forgot to tweak a firefox instance (kept cookies) and google searche result become progressively better ... which is how i noticed that i had forgotten to tweak firefox.
alas, one cannot FORCE people to be smart. it is freedom of choice. one cannot really fault google (or apple) for this.
much more should be stored and managed by user devices but requires ... administration, which is easy but has been butchered by m$, feed to inbreed swines and then thrown into a ungodly cauldron of genetic fusion to yield some mutant OS oozing from all orifices.
anyways, your mail should come to you, your internet connection.
your search history and database should be on a device at your home.
etc. etc.
what is missing is just some new ideas and code and google would be no more?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @07:15PM (1 child)
This is why we need decentralized apps like in Westworld where people could have instantly crowdfunded the extermination of these vermin as soon as they were spotted in public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @11:52PM
Howdy fed. How ya doin' today?