According to recently released court transcripts, Apple has declined numerous chances to challenge Google’s search engine hegemony since 2017, including the chance to buy Microsoft’s Bing and the chance to make the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo the default search engine for users of its Safari private browsing mode.
The previously sealed documents, which were made public this week by the judge overseeing the US government’s antitrust case against Google, show the difficulties Google’s competitors have faced in their attempts to unseat the tech giant from its dominant position as the default search provider on millions of iPhones and Mac computers. For this privilege, Google has been paying Apple at least $10 billion year.
Better offer than Google
Although Tinter omitted the precise monetary amount Microsoft paid Apple, he said that the company was certain it offered a better deal than Google. In his own words, “That’s based on our best estimates of the revenue payments that Google was making to Apple in the United States.”
Apple offers to DuckDuckGo
Weinberg testified that Apple had been actively collaborating with DuckDuckGo on a plan that may have made it the default search engine in the private mode of the Safari browser while keeping Google as the default in the normal mode, which records user behaviour. They seemed to be taking it quite seriously, in our opinion. Approximately 20 meetings and phone calls that DuckDuckGo had with Apple officials, including some senior executives, on the subject ranged from late 2017 to late 2019, Weinberg testified to the court last month. Apple even went so far as to give DuckDuckGo a draught contract containing particular potential revenue sharing after the two businesses debated everything from product mockups to contractual phrasing.
CEO of DuckDuckGo
The testimony given behind closed doors by the CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, and a senior Apple employee, John Giannandrea, provides a picture of the types of botched transactions and backroom talks that have helped Google maintain its dominance as the top search engine in the globe. Giannandrea gave testimony a month ago. Following a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that sparked a series of additional negotiations between the two firms, Apple started taking a partnership with Bing seriously in 2018.
In the end, Apple insiders gave Cook four choices: buy Bing entirely; invest in Bing and have an ownership stake in the search engine; work with Microsoft to create a shared search index that both firms could use; or do nothing and keep the Google alliance going.
Bing Deal
Giannandrea was against moving forward with a Bing contract, he claimed, mainly because Apple’s testing revealed that Bing was generally inferior to Google and that changing Bing as the default would not be in the best interests of Apple’s users. In an internal email, he made a similar case for why continuing the cooperation with DuckDuckGo was “probably a bad idea.” (DuckDuckGo licences Bing’s search results.) Giannandrea said that some Apple employees still believed that partnering with Bing in some way might be advantageous for the company. Adrian Perica, who oversees Apple’s strategic investment and merger initiatives, said in a 2018 email shared in closed session that working with Microsoft on search technology will “build them up.”