A Google Witness Let Slip Just How Much It Pays Apple For Safari Search
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Google gives Apple a 36 percent cut of all search ad revenue that comes from Safari, according to University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy. Google had fought to keep the number confidential, but Bloomberg reports that Murphy shared the figure while testifying in Google’s defense today at the Google antitrust trial.
Google has long paid to be the default search engine in Safari and other browsers like Firefox, spending $26.3 billion in 2021 alone for the privilege. $18 billion of that went to Apple, but the specifics of where the number came from remained secret until now. Google has been trying to keep such details under wraps as the trial goes on, but bits and pieces have seeped out anyway. According to Bloomberg, Google lawyer John Schmidtlein “visibly cringed when Murphy said the number.” Google declined to comment in an email to The Verge; Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Apple’s Eddy Cue defended the deal in September, saying Apple actually wanted a bigger cut of the money Google makes from Safari traffic, but the companies settled on the lower number Murphy revealed today. While specific numbers were discussed that day, they were only talked about in closed sessions, away from the ears of press.
The US Justice Department filed its antitrust charges alleging its search monopoly following an investigation by 50 US attorneys general that began in 2019. The trial started on September 12th.
Google Paid Samsung $8 Billion Over 4 Years For Play Store Monopoly
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The ongoing Google vs. Epic trial has brought out another interesting piece of information. As per testimony presented by Epic Games (via Bloomberg), Google paid Samsung $8 billion over a period of four years to keep Search, Assistant, and Play Store as default services on Samsung phones.
When questioned by Epic’s lawyers on Monday, James Kolotouros, Vice President for Partnerships at Google, said that Google struck deals with Android phone makers to ensure their devices were pre-loaded with the Google Play Store. Kolotouros testimony further revealed that Samsung’s phones and other devices account for half or more of the entire Google Play Store revenue.
In 2019, Google reportedly ran an initiative called “Project Banyan.” Under it, the company invested funds so the Google Play Store could remain on Samsung devices alongside the Galaxy Store. The company even offered to pay $200 million over four years to Samsung to make the Galaxy Store available within the Play Store, complete with its billing system. However, those plans were later scrapped, and Google reportedly signed three deals worth $8 billion with Samsung.
[...] Epic is trying to show that Google discouraged third-party app stores on Android devices by paying device makers to pre-install and make the Google Play Store the default app downloading destination. Google has been striking such deals for a long time, and they are also under scrutiny in a separate anti-trust suit brought on by the Department of Justice.
Related Stories
In mid-June 2019, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella received a rude awakening in an email warning that Google had officially gotten too far ahead on AI and that Microsoft may never catch up without investing in OpenAi.
With the subject line "Thoughts on OpenAI," the email came from Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, who is also the company's executive vice president of AI. In it, Scott said that he was "very, very worried" that he had made "a mistake" by dismissing Google's initial AI efforts as a "game-playing stunt."
[...] As just one example, Scott warned, "their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially useful in the mobile app, is getting scarily good."
Microsoft had tried to keep this internal email hidden, but late Tuesday it was made public as part of the US Justice Department's antitrust trial over Google's alleged search monopoly.
[...] In an order unsealing the email among other documents requested by The Times, US District Judge Amit Mehta allowed to be redacted some of the "sensitive statements in the email concerning Microsoft's business strategies that weigh against disclosure"—which included basically all of Scott's "thoughts on OpenAI."
[...] Mere weeks later, Microsoft had invested $1 billion into OpenAI, and there have been billions more invested since through an extended partnership agreement. In 2024, the two companies' finances appeared so intertwined that the European Union suspected Microsoft was quietly controlling OpenAI and began investigating whether the companies still operate independently. Ultimately, the EU dismissed the probe, deciding that Microsoft's $13 billion in investments did not amount to an acquisition, Reuters reported.
(Score: 4, Touché) by crafoo on Thursday November 16 2023, @09:36AM (1 child)
Google doesn't care what the public thinks or knows about anything. They care about revealing the number to their competitors or to someone with actual power that might use it as leverage for political reasons. The public are powerless cattle. They might moooo and complain about their feed but even their representatives don't care what they think. Thankfully.
I was surprised how high the numbers are, but then I don't really have a feeling for the scale of business at that level. I guess it would be cool if search providers had to run a gauntlet of tests to determine who actually had the best and most useful search engine to be selected as the default. but that is naive utopia daydreaming: a waste of time. I might as well start believing in free-markets too LMAO
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 16 2023, @07:54PM
36% for the default selection spot on the browser Apple controls.
It's the same as retail placement. Do you want your perfume on the counter, in the glass case, actively promoted to shoppers as they walk in the store, or buried on the bottom shelf behind another promotional display? The retailer controls that placement and their product suppliers pay them in various ways for preferred placement. 36% of profits isn't really all that much, if your placement is increasing sales 10 fold.
On the opposite tack, our local big box hardware store (Lowes) places all their "little ticket" items, like 3 way outlet adapters, simple plumbers' strap, etc. in the worst possible placements possible - literally on the bottom shelves behind other stuff. You can find what you're looking for on the mobile app and it will guide you to the shelf number where it's located, but anytime I'm looking for something that costs less than $3 which has $10-$20 alternatives that might be used instead, that simple cheap thing I'm looking for somehow ends up behind one of those mobile display boxes they stick in the aisle, obscuring the stuff on the shelf.
A semi-competitor of ours developed the "Breathe Right" nasal stent product. The "science" was the easiest part. Getting NFL players to wear them on camera wasn't all that hard. They said the hardest part of the whole product launch was getting the shelf space in the retail drug stores (CVS, Walgreens, etc.) apparently they had to be careful with the timing to get it on the shelves just before their media blitz hit, because if they sat on the shelves unsold for a couple of months they would lose the space and all the payola they put out to get that shot at proving their product can sell in sufficient quantity to earn its 6" of shelf space at eye level.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2023, @09:55AM (8 children)
After all Edge is the default on Windows and plenty of people were using it to download and install Chrome (assuming they were allowed to - not their organization's computer).
Only when Edge got better did more people start saying it's good enough.
Same goes for Google search. I suspect if some other search engine was better AND stayed better, within a few years it would beat Google search in market share (I remember Infoseek, Altavista and so on). Nowadays I do use Yandex search (image and web) for some stuff (better for certain image and web searches, and better for getting more hits from site:xyz.com keyword searches but you end up needing to keep doing captchas if you use that a lot). But Google search results are still better in general. DDG and Bing generally aren't worth bothering with if the results matter more to you.
Maybe Apple users are less likely to change their search?
As for Samsung, AFAIK they still have their Galaxy store so what monopoly? And seems to me that Samsung users complain more about Samsung's apps and bloat than about Google's stuff. For a while even the Samsung flagship stuff was showing ads. Pay flagship premiums and still get ads ( https://9to5google.com/2021/08/18/samsung-ads-removal-report/ [9to5google.com] ). 🤣
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 16 2023, @11:32AM (6 children)
Yes, it's really that bad. The issue is monopolistic power, not how good or how bad the browser is. With monopolistic power, you can prevent any competitor gaining traction in the market. Can you say with certainty that Google's monopoly hasn't quashed some other browser that had far superior security? Or, one that used a tiny fraction of the resources? Or one that was faster by orders of magnitude? What has Google prevented from entering the market? Without that monopoly, we may have seen half a dozen new browsers spring into existence, two to four of them proven utter failures, maybe one or two gaining a following, and maybe another actually competing with Chrome head to head.
Monopolies DO NOT encourage innovation.
The newest thing around is Arc browser. https://thebrowser.company/ [thebrowser.company] I have little interest in it. (I've downloaded and installed it on the MacBook, but don't really use it.) But, it does have it's following. How many others have we been deprived of?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday November 16 2023, @12:42PM (5 children)
How does Google "quash" other browsers and search engines (the latter being the thread subject)? I have just done a search on Google* for "Search Engines" and funnily enough the top hit is 21 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead Of Google. Most of the other first page hits are also about using something superior to Google.
* Just for this experiment. I usually use DDG.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 16 2023, @12:59PM (2 children)
Search engines are easy. That is the subject of TFA, as you point out. If Google weren't paying billions to be the default search on computers around the world, perhaps Duck would become ubiquitous. Or Searx, or Quant, or who knows what. Suppose that new computers simply didn't come with a default, instead you opened your browser for the first time, and it ASKED YOU which search engine you want to be default. You want Bing, you get Bing. You want Baidu, you get Baidu. Think about it: being the default search engine is literally worth billions of dollars. Deprive Google of that monopolistic power, and Google is quite likely to sink from top spot to third, or sixth, or even twelfth place. It wouldn't take long for the effect of those billions of dollars of income to help boost other search engines closer to the top.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 16 2023, @07:59PM (1 child)
>If Google weren't paying billions to be the default search on computers around the world, perhaps Duck would become ubiquitous. Or Searx, or Quant, or who knows what.
This is the reality of the "free" market. It is anything but free. There are advantageous placements, and those placements cost more than a startup can ever hope to pay.
It's not just browsers, or search engines, or mobile apps... this is true of chips and soda (and everything else) in your grocery store, snacks in your gas station, clothes in the shopping malls, retail outlets in urban areas, utility providers... most everything (in urban areas) has limited access and therefore a price to pay for the best placement. Construction permits, taxes, restaurant leases... this is capitalism as it really is, it's nothing about free markets, everything about stability for the big players.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 17 2023, @12:37AM
This year. In a few years, that can be very different.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2023, @02:29PM (1 child)
We found the google employee.
(Score: 2, Troll) by DannyB on Thursday November 16 2023, @02:57PM
During a trial, Google needs to be more careful about who they put in their witless list to give testiphony.
Satin worshipers are obsessed with high thread counts because they have so many daemons.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday November 16 2023, @01:44PM
I use DDG by default. In the beginning, I compared a few searches with google and found results to be very similar. Could you point out some (specific) weaknesses?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday November 16 2023, @02:49PM (3 children)
Is this just a starter/install fee or is it ongoing? What happens if the users change the default search engine? Knowing full well that most people probably won't or even know that they can do it or how to do it. After all for the majority of people searching the web is Google, after all they even turned it into a verb as a replacement for searching online.
Still $18 billion is a fuckton of money to get adverts from MacOS users, still they are a known crowd that are used to paying to much for things so perhaps they are worth it. But according the latest numbers I could find about 1/3 of the worlds population doesn't even use the internet. So there goes 2,6 billion potential customers, leaving the other 5,4 billion people that are online. To make matters worse the MacOS market share of the online people is only like 15% or so, not counting their phones but just desk/laptop computers then. So we are now below a billion people, 0.8 billion at most. That is a lot of money per user. But then I guess not all people are worth an equal amount from an advertisement point of view. So it might be still worse then that. A western world user is probably worth more ad$ compared to someone in the developing world -- still those people might not be the once that splurge on a Mac anyway. Still a lot worse. I would be ashamed to if I paid $18 billion for being the default search engine for MacOS/Safari. Talk about burning money.
Perhaps this is the explanation as to why Apple have not made their own search engine for their users, it's just not worth it from their point of view. Better to get $18 billion from Google. Apparently they do have one, called Pegasus. But they only use it for their App-store. So Google is basically paying them $18 billion not to compete with them on the online search market. As long as the money from Google keeps coming and that amount is larger then what they would make on their own I guess Pegasus for the public isn't going to be a thing.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday November 16 2023, @03:29PM
I believe it's a yearly contract deal kind of thing.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday November 16 2023, @03:36PM (1 child)
Yeah, this Arstechnica article says annual payments: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-wraps-defense-by-arguing-its-search-dominance-benefits-everyone/ [arstechnica.com]
Funny part: (Google stabbed themselves in the back.)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday November 16 2023, @03:42PM
Apple is happy enough taking Google's money in return for not doing something that would cost them lots of money to get started.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Thursday November 16 2023, @05:12PM (3 children)
One of the first things I do when setting up a new device is to remove Google as the default search engine, and have done so for the past decade. I don't agree with a single thing they stand for.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 16 2023, @08:02PM (2 children)
On the flip side, the first thing I do when setting up a desktop environment is: install Chrome as the default browser - which it is not in Windows, Ubuntu, and OSX.
Pretty telling about where their bread gets buttered.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 17 2023, @12:42AM (1 child)
Or rather that they can't or won't cut a deal with Microsoft. My money is on "can't".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 17 2023, @01:55AM
Browsers are the razors, search based advertisments are the blades...
🌻🌻 [google.com]