Apple Wants to Help Google Defend Search Engine Deal Worth Billions

Apple wants to defend its multi-billion dollar search engine deal with Google, which is in danger because Google has been found guilty of violating antitrust law. Apple has asked the court handling Google's lawsuit with the U.S. government for an emergency stay [PDF], so that Apple has time to intervene and plead its case before a remedy is decided on.

Google Logo Feature Slack
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Google for anti-competitve behavior in the search market way back in 2020, and after a lengthy legal battle, the DoJ won. A main component of the lawsuit was Google's deal with Apple, which sees Google pay billions annually to be the default search engine for Safari. The court decided that the agreement between Apple and Google violated antitrust law, and is a major reason Google has been able to maintain its search engine monopoly.

The U.S. government asked the court to bar Google from entering into contracts with Apple, among other restrictions, and that will cost Apple a lot of money. In 2022, for example, Google paid Apple $20 billion. Apple already asked the court to allow it to be more involved in the case as remedies are decided on, and the court denied the request due to timing. Apple appealed the decision, and is asking for a stay while the appeal plays out.

Apple says that because its deal with Google is at stake, it deserves a right to participate, and without a stay, it will "suffer clear and substantial irreparable harm."

Apple will be unable to participate in discovery and develop evidence in the targeted fashion it has proposed as this litigation progresses toward a final judgment. If Apple's appeal is not resolved until during or after the remedies trial, Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade.

In addition to prohibiting deals between Apple and Google, the U.S. Department of Justice also has more extreme remedies in mind, including forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser and uncoupling Android from other products like Google Search and the Google Play Store. Google has a lot to defend against, and will prioritize Chrome over its deal with Apple.

When initially asking to take a larger role in the case, Apple said that Google "can no longer adequately represent Apple's interests" because of the wide scope of the case. Unsurprisingly, the DoJ does not want Apple involved in the remedies portion of the trial, which is set to start in April.

If the court decides that Google can't pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari, Apple would still have to offer Google Search as an option in some capacity, but would not be able to continue to collect money for doing so.

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Top Rated Comments

Blackstick Avatar
9 months ago
Tl;dr, Apple stands to lose a lot of money from Google per year if the case doesn’t go their way.

Funny thing is, this money is about one single line in the Safari code.
Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)
sw1tcher Avatar
9 months ago
Apple wants to defend its multi-billion dollar search engine deal with Google...
This is stating the obvious. Why would Apple want to give up the ~$20 billion per year? That's free money.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Google for anti-competitve behavior in the search market way back in 2020, and after a lengthy legal battle, the DoJ won.
The old DoJ won. The new DoJ which is undergoing a leadership change could drop the case, hence all the moves by the big tech companies and their CEOs over the past few months
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jz0309 Avatar
9 months ago
I can understand Apples desire, but, on the other hand, Google dominance in search is not healthy and it’s all ad and tracking based.
Popcorn out, will be interesting to watch
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
vantelimus Avatar
9 months ago

I wonder what the ROI on that $20B is, that's sick.
If probably costs Apple a couple thousand dollars on administrative minutia per year. So, ROI is on the order of magnitude of 1 billion percent. Of course, that plummets to an order of magnitude of only 100,000% once expensive lawyers get involved. IOW, the numbers here are crazy.


I switch everything to DuckDuckGo, honestly though I usually just ask GPT first now. I guess the next thing will be 'default LLM' for Apple Intelligence.
Your observation that you use GPT is the key one here. We are in the process of having search engines replaced by a new technology. Even if we grant that Google has had a monopoly by dint of this deal with Apple -- which I do not -- that advantage is now being eliminated by market competition from AI.

This is a key issue with antitrust in the age of exponential technology growth. By the time governments identify, build, and prosecute a case against a monopoly, the conditions of the market may have changed to the point that the intervention is either unnecessary or ineffective. The government can only act after a monopoly has been established for a long enough period of time that it doesn’t appear to be just a temporary fluctuation in the market. Nowadays, due to the pace of growth, by the time the government can act and prosecute, technology has already advanced to a point that the monopoly is being broken by competition from innovative competitors.

We've seen this multiple times now. AI started to replace search engines even while the DoJ argued against search-engine monopolies. Internet Explorer had already been eclipsed by Firefox, with Chrome on the rise by the time the EU forced Microsoft to allow a different default browser, not to mention that desktop browsers were rapidly being eclipsed by mobile-computing browsers. In more recent years, Facebook was seen to be a rising monopoly in social media, particularly after its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. By the time the government started considering action to break up Facebook, TikTok was already disrupting the market.

Ultimately, antitrust enforcement in the digital age risks being either too late to matter or unnecessary altogether. If legal action cannot match the speed of technological change, market forces become the only truly effective check on monopoly power.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
gaximus Avatar
9 months ago
It would be stupid of them NOT to want to help.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
9081094 Avatar
9 months ago

This is stating the obvious. Why would Apple want to give up the ~$20 billion per year? That's free money.
Imagine if Apple put all that money to work or maybe even a fraction of it…

Siri would have brains; iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS and all the other OS-es Apple will come up would be state of the art and stable available in all languages at the same time.

Their pro software like Final Cut Pro, motion, logic etc. would get regular updates and the choice for moviemakers.

Their consumer software like pages, numbers, keynote, iMovie would get regular updates and enjoy a greater audience.

It’s a pity Timmy is more focused on paying dividends to shareholders instead of making great products again.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)