12 mo. ago • 100%

Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

arstechnica.com Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

Google and Apple specifically requested that detail be confidential.

15 comments

I love when corpos go to court

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- Only when they're not on the plaintiff side of things.
  
  18
  
  Good distinction!
  
  16
Part of me hopes we get something like the EU browser choice mandate out of this. First time you open Safari you pick your search engine from a list of major providers, and maybe the option to pick your own too.

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- I’m really curious, I can’t imagine many people choosing something other than google, but apparently google thinks enough people would to make it worth giving up almost 40% of their entire revenue.
  
  Seems to me they’re mostly paying for the data they’re getting out of this, I can imagine they’d be making more money without the deal. Maybe slightly fewer users, but 40% more revenue.
  
  16
  
  I don't think google fear Apple having to offer a choice to users. They fear Apple defaulting to Bing or something else.
  
  While most people might choose google when presented with a choice, possibly more people are just going to keep the default settings when not presented with a choice.
  
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  Google's quality has been declining for years. I don't expect for it to remain unchallenged for long.
  
  8
  
  Maybe people are not really choosing, just going with the only option they know/ remember. If they have to choose from a menu, the first option is very likely and I imagine randomness would be involved.
  
  1
- It is a thing on Android already, when you set up your phone you're asked to choose a default search engine, you have a choice of Yahoo, DDG, Yandex and a few others
  
  8
Murphy should probably stay clear of windows and high-risk endeavors for the rest of his life.

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I gotta say, it was brilliant while it worked. I definitely use it bc it’s the default.

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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

For the DOJ—which has made the Google-Apple deal the center of its case alleging that Google maintains an illegal monopoly over search—this detail confirms how valuable default placements on iPhones are to the search leader.

Previously, sources told The New York Times that Google paid Apple approximately $18 billion in 2021 for the deal, but the exact amount of revenue sharing remained unknown until Monday.

The DOJ's trial also recently revealed that Google paid $26 billion in total for default contracts, which are ostensibly responsible for driving up its search advertising revenue that is right now rapidly climbing.

In total, across all those default deals, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint estimated in a post on X that it's possible that Google derives "at least $90 billion of its current annual revenue."

"We’re continuing to focus on making AI more helpful for everyone; there’s exciting progress and lots more to come,” Pichai said in a statement reported by Search Engine Land.

Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the antitrust trial, has said that the Google-Apple default deal is the "heart" of the DOJ's case against Google.

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