According to court records, in 2022 alone, Google paid Apple $20 billion to become the default search engine on the Safari browser.
The agreement between the two American technology giants is at the heart of an antitrust lawsuit against Google in the search market and related advertising business.
Previously, the two companies tried to ‘hide’ the value of the agreement. At last year’s trial, Apple executives only stated a general number – ‘billions of dollars’. Recently, a Google witness accidentally revealed that this company pays 36% of revenue from search advertising to ‘apple’.
Every month Google has to pay Apple more than 1 billion USD to be the default search engine on Safari.
This amount was also not announced in the parties’ securities filings. In addition, the document shows that payments from Google account for a large proportion of the iPhone manufacturing giant’s income, for example in 2020, this amount accounted for 17.5% of total revenue.
The agreement with Apple is one of the most important agreements for Google when the iPhone is the most popular smartphone in the US.
Apple first agreed to use Google search on Safari web browsing in 2002 without charge. However, the parties later agreed to share revenue from search advertising. Since May 2021, Google must pay Apple more than $1 billion per month to maintain the default search engine.
Meanwhile, court documents also show that Microsoft – the company that owns the Bing search engine, has repeatedly enticed Apple with the offer to share up to 90% of advertising revenue to become the default search engine. in Safari.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during last year’s trial that the software giant was willing to make some bigger concessions, including hiding the Bing brand, to convince “apple” to switch.
(Theo Bloomberg)
