The biggest potential outcome of this trial is that the Google-Apple deal is deemed illegal and maybe that forces Apple to buy or build their own search engine. There is clearly no real competition in search, and just because Google’s stagnant product is currently the “best” doesn’t excuse the ways in which it continues to degrade in quality and become more user-hostile.
I'm in the US and DDG is my default because privacy or something but pretty much any remotely complex query, I end up switching to google and get way better results.
I am in New Zealand and I find DDG works well. I switched from Google several years ago and whenever I accidently use Google (e.g. on a new device) I must say I wasn't impressed with the quality of Google's results -- DDG is easily on par or even better.
> The biggest potential outcome of this trial is that the Google-Apple deal is deemed illegal and maybe that forces Apple to buy or build their own search engine.
They're already on it for many years. What do you think the spotlight web suggestions, including direct link to the site if the match is good are?
Yeah, I get it too after learning the actual context but it was absolutely not the first meaning I got. It’s like how Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
It’s for-sure at least close. To the meaning, anyway.
(You’re right that putting it through the proper formula, the figure that comes out is more like a 2x return—I was a bit hasty. The total value is 3x, not what Google sees)
Investment has a precise meaning in accounting, and the money Google pays Apple does not satisfy that definition. You can tell because Google did not receive any stocks, equity shares, notes or bonds in exchange for the money given.
It is a marketing expense is not an investment. Whether it helpful to Google's bottom line for Google to incur the expense depends on all the other expenses entailed in pursuing the revenue opportunity. Programmer salaries for instance. Investments don't have that quality where the attractiveness of the investment depends on many other investment amounts.
Financial accounting is not hard to learn. It is not quantum physics. Is it too much to ask that if you have not yet learned it, then please do not use terms with technical meanings such as "return on investment" or ROI?
It’s used in a less-technical sense all the time in business, and that usage doesn’t seem to cause problems.
[edit] example: using the term ROI where the “investment” is COGS is downright common.
[edit edit] I’ve verified my observation that this is a common usage in marketing circles, specifically, too. I think this is an example of “incorrection”: “you’re wrong! (if I define the context to be one in which you’re wrong, and different from the one you were clearly operating in)”
From Google's point of view - this is a worthwhile origination fee. If you lose the entire "default" iOS population, you could lose a generation of minds in a key market (US mobile users).
The more people dissociate "search" with "google it", the less Google makes on their larger non-iOS search revenue.
The ad ecosystem is pretty complex. While you and I have opinions about it, and Google's business model, the problem with the DoJ is: it does NOT have opinions about advertising. It doesn't seem to have a coherent grip on the WHY behind this stuff at all, it seems to forget that courts legislate all the time, that opinions matter.
Maybe instead of courtroom antics and bullshit about making Google look bad; and maybe instead of narrowly focusing on the case law and quote enquote winnable that's-how-the-law-works arguments... they should go and pitch a persuasive opinion on why any of this shit matters. Because they're leaving an intellectual vacuum to be filled by fucking podcasters, all but guaranteeing the DoJ will lose.
Close enough to the regular 30% Apple tax. Plus a 6% cherry on top — because Google has enough to spend; especially since search is their core business.
Ads are their core business today. Search is only there to serve more ads. Google stopped being a search company when they bought/merged with double click.
Google without ads is an unprofitable company that constantly makes bad technology bets and cancels projects more often than they release anything useful.
And in court. It wouldn't be surprising to me if they lost to Epic after Apple won, despite actually already allowing sideloading and alternative app stores.
Goes along with the "don't be evil" mantra. They started as pure tech and found a money geyser, no reason to upset the applecart when they're already making out like bandits.
They're making money hand over fist right now, and they still have startup-esque growth rates, so they don't need to be tough negotiators. When Google's revenue and growth flattens, you'll see the toughness come in
It's not a negotiation. It's google paying whatever sky-high sum apple demands, because google and their shitty search engine are toast the moment it's no longer the default.
Google is an ad company. The products they make are just good enough to reach a certain number of users and only if they get good telemetry and behavioural signals out of it.
Imagine how much more expensive (and risky) it would be to focus on products that would appeal to a larger user base. In the long term, 36% is nothing compared to the investment and costs of trying to make more people switch to Android.
> Huh? We've gone from being mad at Google for bribing Apple to being mad at Apple for charging too much?
Isn't accepting a bribe also as bad as offering it? Apple is a gate keeper of a huge segment. There can only be one default. You either come to an agreement with them or lose.
If the general consensus is that Google is is abusing monopoly in this case, what should the resolution be?
- Google isn't allowed to pay Apple, but other search engines are.
- Nobody is allowed to pay Apple, and Apple should pick one without getting anything in return.
- Apple is forced to offer a choice on startup. But which search engines would be at the top of this list? And how should Apple decide that?
The first option seems unfair to Google (in a lawsuit about "fairness"). The second and third a loss for Apple more than Google.
Turn that around - would you, please, explain how this is extortion.
It sounds like both parties benefit from the arrangement, and they've renewed the agreement numerous times. Monopolistic or anti-competitive, I could see that, but I'm not sure I follow your point about it being extortion.
this makes me wonder if the "Here's what I found on the web." from Siri is intentional and not due lack of ability to parse and provide an appropriate response.
For those unaware of history, Google's "ad revenue share" deal with Apple is similar to the early "distribution deal" that ~2002 Google struck with America Online. The basic financial enticement is the same: use our search engine and we'll give you a cut of the ad revenue.
I've not yet seen a legal explanation of why the Apple ad revenue share deal is now "illegal" and yet the AOL deal wasn't. Somewhat similar deals also happen with tv networks where they sign exclusive "distribution deals" with sports leagues and they share the money they get from tv commercials (the ads). "Put your NFL Monday game or college basketball tournament on our tv network and you get some of our ad revenue."
I guess the difference now is that Google is really big. Ok. But is that really the only reason?
Exclusive deals can present antitrust issues, but the kicker is that this isn't even an exclusive deal, it's a default deal! Users can still can still use other search engines on iOS devices.
Defaults matter. Google's internal communication indicates that they know this. Microsoft testified that defaults matter and that unless they (or anyone else) could put up more money than Google then they had no shot.
You could innovate and make a better product and it doesn't matter because you can't outbid Google.
In Europe Androids have had user decided default browser/search engine selection in the out of box set up for years. Google still wins massively because users know it is simply a superior product.
Part of the antitrust issue is that Apple never developed their own search engine because of these payments. Google paid Apple to not compete.
I doubt that the same number of people willingly choose Google, otherwise they wouldn't be paying so much money to be the default. That's a lot of money to throw away.
How is this different from any typical outsourcing arrangement other than the size?
Outsourcing arrangements many different motivations, it’s not just money. Otherwise, basically any outsourcing arrangement can be said to be “throwing away money” for one party.
It's a widespread assumption that defaults matter. But to what degree? I came across it first when I saw Dan Ariely's talk and his work on defaults (may not be the proponent)[1] but my takeaway is that it matters when you don't care about the as much.
For everyone with Windows, you start off with Edge/IE and then Bing as a default search engine. Yet, most switch to Chrome + Google almost instantly. People care about their browsing experience more than we give them credit for. Remember in 2009-10 when Chrome was new, it managed to win market share cos of superior product when it was not the default on Windows/Linux/MacOSX.
On mobile too, the behavior is likely going to be there to a certain degree. While Google pays Apple a massive fee, there was an admission earlier in the trial that both Mozilla and Apple would still go ahead w Google (even without the deals) because of superior UX. Not sure if both said it, but one of them certainly did.
Maybe look at some of the trial exhibits that have been posted on the DOJ website. Google sure as hell thinks defaults matter a lot. And intent matters at trial.
From the trial itself, Google has argued and questioned the expert witness from DOJ if defaults really matter. Whole Microsoft question was raised by them too. Exhibits are good with context, but without supplementing the context they are misleading. Hard to argue for something DOJ did not think would make their case stronger and did not refer to in the trial.
I believe it's because they were using their monopoly power to give that software away for free, while their competitors couldn't and ended up selling or going out of business.
The DOJ should really be looking at things like YouTube, which doesn't make any profit (I don't believe) but since Google proper supports it, no one can compete with it. That might be why Google is pushing so hard against ad blockers, they need to make YouTube profitable to avoid prosecution.
Google bought YouTube in 2006. Coincidence they care about YouTube ad revenue so much all of a sudden? I guess they were getting around to it eventually.
You can change the default of Safari, but not for Siri. "Search the Internet" voice command always uses Google. I'm personally hoping that either part of this lawsuit or part of their Siri upgrade allows us to change it.
using Kagi is pretty clumsy. We iOS users get to pick from a pretty limited list. In reality we should be able to set search to any endpiont that handles the ‘q’ param
> I guess the difference now is that Google is really big. Ok. But is that really the only reason?
So as you are insinuating things why not be clear and name it? What is it, corruption? Or do you think that the fact that AOL deal wasn't considered illegal, no deal ever will be and Apple/Google are free to do as they please? Your idea of justice is quite weird.
I believe OP was genuinely interested in identifying rationale for this discrepancy in legal precedent, regardless of any personal stance they hold on the justice of this business deal.
OP didn't describe any particular legal precedent though, so we don't know why OP thinks the AOL deal was legal. There's a big difference between "nobody cared enough to sue or prosecute X behavior" and "X behavior has been tested in court and was ruled legal".
I don't know the answer to your question, but the fact that the Google-AOL deal was never challenged doesn't mean it was legal. Plenty of illegal things are never challenged.
Generally something is legal until there’s a law saying it isn’t. That’s kind of how it just works in America, and it not just here either.
When that Google-AOl deal Google wasn’t even close to as popular as it is now. It was a simple distribution deal. People are tunneled in on the iPhone because that’s Apple’s juggernaut now but this deal with Apple also goes back to like 2002 when I was still convincing people to switch off Yahoo and MSN to Google. They also made a similar deal with Mozilla which is still basically how Mozilla is still able to operate at all.
I mean 2002 Yahoo probably could have outspent 2002 Google. 2002 Microsoft definitely could have and it’s not like MSN was a juggernaut, but they were complacent. I’ll just say it: Google wanted it more. Search and Advertising was basically all they were at the time, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube or any of that other stuff we associate with them now, and they went out and took the opportunities they could. They developed a toolbar for IE users, setup distribution deals for the toolbar, put it in the Firefox directory, and sought out new avenues of information to index like when they acquired Deja News and Blogger, and subsequently launched Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google News, Alerts, Images, Patents, GOOG-411, etc. Even acquiring and developing Android was a play that ensured even if their relationships went south and Microsoft came to dominate Mobile in a way that was beginning to look a lot more possible in 2006 (and not so much in 2011) they would never be entirely locked out of Mobile if that ever became a thing (which uh, spoiler alert, it did).
And when did Google really start to look like the juggernaut in the room? Well in Jan 2005 they had 35.1% of the search market to Yahoo’s 31.8% and a year later Google was at 41.4% to Yahoo’s 28.7%.[1] So probably you could say sometime about 2004 around when they IPO’d, maybe, is the soonest you could say they were really a juggernaut. That’s dominance but that sure isn’t anything close to a monopoly, and they were just outcompeting in both quality and distribution and in their search and ad product offerings. Acquiring DoubleClick even after Microsoft bid up the price was also a pretty good hat trick that was like a rocket booster for their ad business, putting Microsoft in a position where they had to spend almost twice as much for aQuantive only to write it down 5 years later.
This is why antitrust law is so scuffed. The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge. They’re going to lose hard while playing up whatever small victories they can get along the way while wasting a lot of money in court and then the administration is going to change again which might continue any cases in progress but is still going to have its political priorities shift.
> The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge
Your whole argument hinges on this and I fail to find a problem in it. What's OK when you have 1% of the market is, by law and reason, not OK when you have 99% of the market. It seems fully logical that that also means old contracts and behavior might need change.
No, my argument is that it’s a weak case, full stop, that hinges on Google growing from a 400 pound gorilla to an 800 pound gorilla by outcompeting their direct competitors in their core business that the company was founded on, making deals, acquiring other businesses in areas they needed to improve upon (or reasonably thought they did) and developing new search and ad products to expand their business. You can’t punish them for making a deal ex post facto because it was the winning strategy and their competitors turned out to be the greatest cultural lobster trap inventors[1] and the Windows company that has basically stopped innovating on the web the moment they stopped perceiving it as a threat (which they were so wrong about).
Google’s core business is search and advertising and they have worked from the company’s inception to acquire users and customers in both, successfully, and more so than their competition both earlier in their history and later and they have developed business partners along the way who value that continued business relationship.
Making deals isn’t illegal and businesses make deals all the time. The Sherman Antitrust Act declares contracts that restrain trade and commerce illegal, but Google isn’t restraining trade: they’re paying a fair market value for user acquisition and their largest competitors both know what that price is and are unwilling to outbid Google.
Up until 2017, Microsoft even had their own deal with Apple where Siri used Bing results and you couldn’t change that (still can’t control what Siri uses actually, but Siri is garbage). Even so, you can still change the search provider in Safari and Apple only receives money from Google for Safari users when Safari users actually use Google making this more like an affiliate program.
It's not illegal to have these deals; it's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to use your monopoly to prevent others from successfully competing.
And again- no one has made the determination that it is illegal. The DOJ believes it's illegal, but the DOJ doesn't decide what's illegal. We're literally having the trial to figure it out.
So, you're relying on overly simplistic assumptions that are misleading you.
You can easily get the legal arguments, they're on Wikipedia, they're on the doj website, they're on the indictments. The information just needs you to go out and get it.
> The information just needs you to go out and get it.
I am definitely going to use that. And since I teach ninth graders, I predict I will be using that on a daily basis. Blessings upon you. (And the curses of ~175 9th graders every year.)
Sentiment shift. Moral Compass in Silicon Valley ( or more like in the Tech Sector ), Smartphone Revolution and 15 years of zero interest rate.
None of the reported are really "news" apart from the precise 36% figure which is higher than most of our initial estimate. "Customer acquisition cost" isn't new. On a similar note Google also share their Ad revenue with Mozilla / Firefox.
We might not like a lot of what's going on with Google or Apple. But I dont think revenue share is in anyway wrong or illegal.
I think there should be prosecution of Apple based on this, not Google. Because of this huge cut, Apple won't allow other browsers on their platforms, which is anti-competitive.
> Because of this huge cut, Apple won't allow other browsers on their platforms, which is anti-competitive.
That’s not the case, though. What some people complain about is the fact that other browsers must use the WebKit engine, but there is nothing stopping people from putting browsers in the App Store. This is not relevant to this deal. The engine does not matter at all, what matters is the user base.
The engine absolutely matters! If you want to use a feature that is available in Chrome and Firefox, but not in webkit/safari, you are completely out of luck on iOS.
Apple has been holding back web development for many years with this policy. I suspect it is to keep PWAs from being competitive with native apps, but whatever the motivation, that is very much the effect.
> But I dont think revenue share is in anyway wrong or illegal.
It’s a thin line between revenue sharing, which is fine, and anticompetitive bribes to entrench your dominant position and extinguish competition, which is not. I am not saying that it’s the second case, but that’s what the DoJ wants to prove.
"Somewhat similar deals also happen with tv networks where they sign exclusive "distribution deals" with sports leagues and they share the money they get from tv commercials (the ads)."
Except the networks pay the leagues to broadcast games. With so-called "tech" companies, this is reversed. Google is paying Apple and Samsung so that no other search engine gets to be the pre-installed default.
Sports leagues do not pay TV networks in order to prevent other leagues from doing deals with the networks. But Google pays hardware manufacturers to be the pre-instaled default and exclude other search engines.
> According to Bloomberg Law, Google attorney John Schmidtlein "visibly cringed" when Murphy revealed the confidential information, which Google had initially claimed needed to be kept secret because otherwise it “would unreasonably undermine Google’s competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties.”
Well yes making that data public _will_ undermine Google's competitive standing. But that standing was obtained illegally through years of obstructing price discovery despite running a giant ad exchange with auctions that are supposed to be based upon honest numbers.
But by now the market has probably already priced in the impact of these revelations?
What price discovery has Google been obstructing, that of search ads, of browser defaults, or something else? I don't really understand how either of the first two would impact Google's popularity, so could you please explain that as well?
The price discovery of it in the browser, literally the thing that was accidentally leaked, that this article is about. What part of this article talking about payments to be the default search engine would imply search ads or popularity as being relevant?
The parent talked about “… through years of obstructing price discovery despite running a giant ad exchange with auctions…”, so I think it might be the price discovery of ads may be what they’re talking about, though I can’t be certain.
Price discovery of everything Google has yet to disclose to investors. The deals suggest search is much less profitable than indicated in SEC filings.
But also price discovery for competition and content. E.g. Google feeds a ton of Wikipedia content to iOS users through search results. If Wikipedia knew how large the private Apple-Google deal was, maybe they’d ask for a cut or throttle usage.
Puts Apple's marketing in a new light, doesn't it?
>We’re committed to keeping your personal information safe. That’s why we innovate ways to safeguard your privacy on your device, why we’re up front about how we personalize your experience, and why we equip developers with the best tools to protect your data.[0]
Subtly left out that 36% cut they get from making a data collection company the first thing you see in thier app, huh?
Yeah this number may not have been known before now, but it's been clear for a while to anyone who wants to see it that Apple profits from your data like all the other giants, they just have a good way to launder it.
You don't get search results from Safari/Spotlight/etc the first time you use it. You have to click through a warning that it'll send your request to a server.
Also, searching for something isn't necessarily "your personal information" except for when you type in stuff about yourself.
Google's payments are being brought up in a trial where the government is suggesting that 36% is a massive amount of money to pay and is evidence of Google's willingness to pay billions of dollars and a massive percentage of their search revenue just to maintain a monopoly over iOS search.
The followup question is, if 36% of Safari search revenue is the cost of buying a search monopoly on iPhone, and if that's considered to be such a large amount of money to pay that it's evidence of how much Google values being the default search on iOS, then are developers getting something equivalent for their 30%? App developers pay 30% of their iOS revenue and they get way fewer benefits. If 36% is the price of a monopoly, iOS has got developers paying 30% just for access to the platform. But maybe if devs paid an extra 6% Apple would install them by default on every iPhone?
The iOS app store is a separate conversation and I don't think it should be compared to Google's payments. The context of both payment structures is different, and I don't want to act like they are directly comparable. But it is weird to me that anyone would suggest that comparing them somehow makes the app store payments look good. You're paying monopoly-level prices just to be listed on the store; if you're comparing the two then Google is getting a much better deal here than iOS developers are getting.
I mean, heck, I'll pay Apple 36% of all iOS revenue I ever make if they're willing to make my apps the default out-of-the-box experience on every single phone that they sell.
Because they believe it's in their financial interest to not have Apple's traffic go elsewhere. Even if they broke even on the deal, it starves the competition.
Which is why this is coming up in an antitrust trial.
People do talk about how “Google is legitimately better than the competition”[1] while ignoring the competition that never happens because there’s no path to profitability due to googl’s entrenched position.
[1] which isn’t even necessarily true anymore: Google’s search results are awful these days and have been for years, because Google’s no longer competing on search it’s competing on ads.
Though I find I use search very little now. If I just want to know something I don't Google it anymore, I just ask chatgpt. Because it will give me an actual answer instead of a long list of clickbait sites I have to sift through to find my answer.
The only time search still makes sense to me is when I need to find an actual website which is actually not all that often.
As in Google thinks Apple, a company that hasn’t been able to run a first rate (no make it second rate) software service after years - not one, will be able to make something that replaces Google Search? That’s a bit difficult to believe.
But then I believe Google wasn’t thinking Apple could do it well at all. I think Google is sure of - is the typical Apple customer base that will just gobble up whatever Apple shoves down their throat, heartily. Yeah, I think it’s this one :)
One is a research problem, the other is a an engineering problem.
Sure search was a research problem 30 years ago, but most competent undergrads can design a search engine now. You need engineering power to scale it and admins to keep it running.
Why? Mac OS. Same as you typed. I spell it macOS though ;-)
Besides I won’t call it a service. I would call their substandard iCloud a service.
You know what let’s talk about macOS and since we are talking about search let’s talk about Spotlight. God, everything is awful about it. What is worse is that you don’t even know what is happening.
Suddenly your apps stopped turning up in search? Well there are interesting ways suggested on Apple support site to try. No didn’t work? Of course it didn’t. Then why not remove everything and then add the full disk and let it index and then remove it again and then try the selection you want to keep. Naah, didn’t work. That’s fine, it’s normal. Restart it. No no, do it couple of times. It takes few restarts for the indexing engine to get all warmed up. Oh you rather called Apple support? Yeah, they would do it properly. After helping you wipe your Mac twice the next step in the workflow is guiding you through the steps to drop your Mac at a service centre and you’ll get it back in a week or two with some magic sauce poured inside.
It worked? Yup. Apple does it right every single time.
Well, I don’t know if Google thinks Apple could come up with a decent search engine or not. But to your later point, yeah. If Apple developed their own search engine, it would be the default on iOS. And as long as it wasn’t complete garbage, lots of people would leave it be. (And if someone did update it, would they actually pick Google these days?).
Because it’s not “will Apple come up with something that makes Google Search obsolete”, it’s “will Apple come up with something that diminishes search traffic from iOS devices?
Because most users don’t switch the default search settings on their phone and Google’s search revenue would plummet if they lost iPhone traffic. Basically Google depends on paying another company to make sure a bunch of people accidentally use their core product. Yes, that’s a pretty crappy spot for Google to be in but they’ve not had much luck in any business outside search so they’re sorta stuck.
> Google is not unsophisticated, if it was worth less they would pay less.
That isn't how relationships work, regardless of sophistication.
There was a link yesterday about bug bounties, so here's a story from my time handling bug bounties:
1. A major website published a policy setting out their payment schedule for various types of vulnerabilities.
2. A particular researcher submitted an issue which he plausibly characterized as falling into a high-value class of vulnerabilities. He received an award based on that classification.
3. The same guy continued to find vulnerabilities on that platform. He would always include a discussion of how to use his new vulnerability to implement an attack in the high-value category. There was an obvious reason for this: his typical vulnerability was a bog-standard cross site scripting attack, and XSS was specifically listed in the payment schedule as less valuable than the attack type this researcher wanted to be paid for.
4. Every time one of these reports came in, I would forward it to the company with the note "This is a standard cross-site scripting attack, and your policy specifies that it is worth a bounty of $XXX. The researcher notes that this vulnerability can be used to implement an attack with effect Y, and he is correct, but this is true of all cross-site scripting attacks on your site."
5. Then the company would pay out the higher-value bounty.
So this is an example of the value of the report being set unambiguously in public, and a large, "sophisticated" company deliberately ignoring that because they didn't want to adjust their relationship with one particular researcher. (Other researchers reporting identical vulnerabilities didn't know the magic words; they got the listed payout for XSS.)
Because if Google doesn't, then it could see its search monopoly evaporate.
The vast majority of rich people in the world use iPhones. In the US/Canada/UK/Australia/Japan and many more rich countries, the iPhone is the most common device - and even within those countries, the iPhone's demographics skew wealthier. iPhone users are a ton more valuable to advertisers than Android users - they have more money and they're willing to pay for premium things.
Let's say Apple switched to Bing. Most users won't know how to change their search settings so Bing will now get 90%+ of iPhone search traffic (and the most valuable search traffic). This puts rocket fuel into Bing's ad business. Advertisers don't just think Google and nothing else. Suddenly, Bing is potentially more important since iPhone (and Mac) users that they want to reach are going through Bing.
This has big implications for Google's ad business beyond just traffic loss. When we're talking about bidding, more bidders push up the price. It's not just about losing the iPhone's traffic. It's also about losing the ad bidders on the other side. If you're a monopoly on search ads and you lose 30% of your search traffic to a competitor, you are probably losing a lot more than 30% of your revenue. This is because part of your revenue exists due to people getting outbid. Let's say that you and I are bidding for the "laptop" keyword. You bid $1 and I bid $2 to outbid you. Google gets $2. If I decide to move my bidding over to Bing, you get the laptop keyword for $1 and Google's revenue is halved for that keyword - and they're only getting 70% as much traffic on top of that. As traffic shifts, bidders will shift. As bidders shift, the amount paid for the traffic still coming to Google could decline in addition to their traffic declining. So it's not just the loss of Apple-device traffic. It's the loss of bidders that drive up the price of ads even when they lose.
And this has knock-on effects for Google's businesses. If Bing's search ads get this rocket fuel, they start getting the attention to take on Google's ad business for publishers. Google has been steering searches to their properties, but all of a sudden Bing could start steering searches to Microsoft owned properties. Maybe LinkedIn figures out how to get people to post videos in a YouTube-competitive way - and with the most valuable traffic being steered toward those videos. Yea, LinkedIn is supposed to be professional, but it's kinda lost a lot of that over time with random click bait already.
Being the default search engine is a powerful position. You might say that you'd use Google no matter what and we're on HN so you probably know how to change the default search engine. Most people would just end up going along with whatever the default is. Google rose to prominence via their search results, but people aren't feeling as happy about Google's search today. Google has kept their dominance by paying to be the default search engine for almost everyone - either by paying Apple and Mozilla or by paying engineers to create Chrome (and putting a lot of marketing money behind it).
Because iOS users are substantially more valuable than Android users, 6-8x more valuable. I’m positive that Google comes out ahead on this by selling ads to iOS users.
It’s an interesting take and one I hadn’t considered yet - Apple makes Safari the only game in town on iOS to prevent Google from releasing a better browser and ensuring that Google has to pay them $26bn a year.
At no point was this being withheld from the DoJ or the judge, and was absolutely being used as evidence in the trial. It was previously sealed to prevent public disclosure as a trade secret.
I think the US benefits from having tech monopolies in the global economy. I'm not convinced it's going to happen any time soon. I also don't see the incentive to break them up, whatever that means.
Definitely not the only one. Both Google and Apple (and their very highly paid economists, analysts, and CXOs) are betting that this deal is more beneficial to them than the alternatives.
>Both Google and Apple (and their very highly paid economists, analysts, and CXOs) are betting that this deal is more beneficial to them than the alternatives.
it's not customer acquisition though, Google can most likely get lot of users off safari to chrome for cheaper but issue would be that Apple would then get incentive to build search (and like apple maps, they can just embed it into everything without option to change default)
disclaimer: Googler here(not in search PA), this is my personal opinion.
> and like apple maps, they can just embed it into everything without option to change default
The EU would have serious problems with that because of the way Apple used the Music.app > Apple Music transition to basically crowbar themselves into the music streaming market.
They still do it on maps (someone texts you address it ll only open in apple maps and even if you change default app you cant change that), idk if that's any different in europe
Not trying to be a dick or anything — how is it not customer acquisition?
Google knows that there is some percentage of iPhone users who will only ever search with the default Safari engine. Google really wants those users. Google is paying to make sure those users use Google.
I mean, that is definitionally “customer acquisition cost,” right? Or am I missing something?
Maybe it's just me and my bad attitude toward products today but this could explain why everything seems to be turning into low-quality garbage. I'm not a millionaire business man so I must be doing it wrong, but spending over 1/3rd of your revenue stream on customer acquisition rather than anything product-related seems like a bargain I don't want as a consumer.
For SaaS companies, 30-40% sales and marketing expense ratio is totally normal with R&D 20-40%. You need to keep up (in both) if not competitors will eat at your revenue which means even less dollars for product/R&D, running businesses is hard!
Only if you consider CAC on a per-query basis, against top-line revenue, in perpetuity. There's a word for this and it's not CAC, it's tax. And that's what this is, it's a tax on advertisers due to Google's monopoly power. How do we know they have monopoly power? because they can afford to give 36% of top-line revenue in perpetuity to another party and still make money. This implies >80% gross margins, which let's face it, scream monopoly power.
Isn't the point of a crawler to crawl nearly everything? Of course they might weigh some things much heigher (recrawl wikipedia much more frequently, for example), but you don't know what might be interesting as a search result until you've crawled it!
Because this seems like an honest mistake made by an academic who probably isn't used to the pressure of being a witness in a massive antitrust trial? It doesn't seem like he intentionally used his place on the stand to leak information that he knew he shouldn't or anything like that. But there's a good chance that mistake just made him an enemy in the form of a trillion dollar mega-corp, and I don't think it's unreasonable for some legal protections to be extended to him for it.
This is a gross misunderstanding on multiple fronts.
For starters, Kevin Murphy is an external expert witness and not on the payroll of Google. During trials like this, it is expected to hire outside expert witnesses to testify why party X’s thing is “good actually” and why party Y got it wrong.
So Mr. Murphy will be fine.
Secondly, witnesses, expert or otherwise, are indeed compelled to answer questions when on the stand. It would otherwise be quite useless to put them on the stand in the first place.
What happens in cases like this, however, is that there are parts that occur only in front of the judge and the two parties for confidentiality reasons and parts that happen in public for everyone in the gallery to hear.
It’s the job of the lawyers to pay attention to the questions asked to ensure that questions that could lead to answers with confidential information are answered behind closed doors. Witnesses aren’t expected to keep track of this when answering questions unless explicitly briefed by the court to save specific topics for the confidential part of the cross/direct examination.
So the ones that screwed up are the lawyers, perhaps the court, but not the expert witness.
If not for this deal, what would be the default search engine in Safari? I feel like most normal people (not HN weirdos) would be angry if their browser defaulted to something other than Google when they tried to "Google something." Isn't this part of what so many people have complained about with Edge and Bing?
Even 5 years ago I would have said the same but Google search quality has degraded so much that I don't think changing to another one would-be noticeable to the average user.
I don't think the search quality would be the problem. But they would miss these shopping ads and carousels, the restaurant reviews and direct link to google maps, and all that fuzz.
The shopping ads would be a huge lose to many, they are the only reason I ever visit Google these days. I feel like the shopping ads fit my queries much much better than the actual search results if I'm actively looking for a product to buy.
Google as evolved into the number one product search engine. It's doesn't have ay advantage in actual search anymore. DDG, plain Bing and reskins/whitelabels like Ecosia deliver the exact same quality of result and often better, but I suspect that's because there's greater value manipulating Google results. What they can't do is compete with the search engine powering Google ads.
I assume that both parties have market research showing that enough people (maybe even 36%) don't care enough to figure out how to change the search engine or buy a different phone.
I use brave search and usually end up clicking on the google button midway down on the page. Every search engine is inferior and if google wasn't the default search on iOS it would hurt the brand, especially since google is the default search on android. I'm a little older and using bing just feels like altavista in the 90's. Its good enough, but it feels like its selling me something I don't want. Just give me a good search result or I'll have to stop using the phone's web browser to look things up (or manually change the browser search engine with every release).
You have a point... Google just sold Google Domains to SquareSpace, even if it made them millions every year for very little effort. They must make a pretty nice profit on each device to be able to defend keeping the Pixel around, or have it be part of an overall strategy.
The ongoing R&D cost for the Pixel line has to be much more than the cost of developing and running Google Domains.
"According to Bloomberg Law, Google attorney John Schmidtlein "visibly cringed" when Murphy revealed the confidential information, which Google had initially claimed needed to be kept secret because otherwise it "would unreasonably undermine Google's competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties.""
Next you'll be saying that when the federal government says that information must be kept secret for national security reasons, they might not be telling the truth.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadI’m a paying customer and it’s routinely better than Google, it’s now my default.
If it wasn’t for maps I’m not sure how much I would use Google at all any more.
It's going to be a very hard fight to render the deal itself illegal without a very specific, targeted legislation.
They're already on it for many years. What do you think the spotlight web suggestions, including direct link to the site if the match is good are?
> Google pays Apple Inc. 36% of the revenue it earns from search advertising made through the Safari browser
Very different story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
(You’re right that putting it through the proper formula, the figure that comes out is more like a 2x return—I was a bit hasty. The total value is 3x, not what Google sees)
It is a marketing expense is not an investment. Whether it helpful to Google's bottom line for Google to incur the expense depends on all the other expenses entailed in pursuing the revenue opportunity. Programmer salaries for instance. Investments don't have that quality where the attractiveness of the investment depends on many other investment amounts.
Financial accounting is not hard to learn. It is not quantum physics. Is it too much to ask that if you have not yet learned it, then please do not use terms with technical meanings such as "return on investment" or ROI?
[edit] example: using the term ROI where the “investment” is COGS is downright common.
[edit edit] I’ve verified my observation that this is a common usage in marketing circles, specifically, too. I think this is an example of “incorrection”: “you’re wrong! (if I define the context to be one in which you’re wrong, and different from the one you were clearly operating in)”
The more people dissociate "search" with "google it", the less Google makes on their larger non-iOS search revenue.
Maybe instead of courtroom antics and bullshit about making Google look bad; and maybe instead of narrowly focusing on the case law and quote enquote winnable that's-how-the-law-works arguments... they should go and pitch a persuasive opinion on why any of this shit matters. Because they're leaving an intellectual vacuum to be filled by fucking podcasters, all but guaranteeing the DoJ will lose.
Google without ads is an unprofitable company that constantly makes bad technology bets and cancels projects more often than they release anything useful.
Imagine how much more expensive (and risky) it would be to focus on products that would appeal to a larger user base. In the long term, 36% is nothing compared to the investment and costs of trying to make more people switch to Android.
Look at downloads versus spend (circa 2018 graphic, as this is an older deal):
https://www.data.ai/en/insights/market-data/global-app-downl...
And check out concepts of share of wallet and size of wallet per user:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/share-of-wallet.asp
I'm not debating your stat, I'm just saying it's more complicated than that, if you're looking at ad market pay for performance.
Isn't accepting a bribe also as bad as offering it? Apple is a gate keeper of a huge segment. There can only be one default. You either come to an agreement with them or lose.
If the general consensus is that Google is is abusing monopoly in this case, what should the resolution be?
- Google isn't allowed to pay Apple, but other search engines are.
- Nobody is allowed to pay Apple, and Apple should pick one without getting anything in return.
- Apple is forced to offer a choice on startup. But which search engines would be at the top of this list? And how should Apple decide that?
The first option seems unfair to Google (in a lawsuit about "fairness"). The second and third a loss for Apple more than Google.
It sounds like both parties benefit from the arrangement, and they've renewed the agreement numerous times. Monopolistic or anti-competitive, I could see that, but I'm not sure I follow your point about it being extortion.
I've not yet seen a legal explanation of why the Apple ad revenue share deal is now "illegal" and yet the AOL deal wasn't. Somewhat similar deals also happen with tv networks where they sign exclusive "distribution deals" with sports leagues and they share the money they get from tv commercials (the ads). "Put your NFL Monday game or college basketball tournament on our tv network and you get some of our ad revenue."
I guess the difference now is that Google is really big. Ok. But is that really the only reason?
You could innovate and make a better product and it doesn't matter because you can't outbid Google.
I doubt that the same number of people willingly choose Google, otherwise they wouldn't be paying so much money to be the default. That's a lot of money to throw away.
Outsourcing arrangements many different motivations, it’s not just money. Otherwise, basically any outsourcing arrangement can be said to be “throwing away money” for one party.
For everyone with Windows, you start off with Edge/IE and then Bing as a default search engine. Yet, most switch to Chrome + Google almost instantly. People care about their browsing experience more than we give them credit for. Remember in 2009-10 when Chrome was new, it managed to win market share cos of superior product when it was not the default on Windows/Linux/MacOSX. On mobile too, the behavior is likely going to be there to a certain degree. While Google pays Apple a massive fee, there was an admission earlier in the trial that both Mozilla and Apple would still go ahead w Google (even without the deals) because of superior UX. Not sure if both said it, but one of them certainly did.
[1] https://danariely.com/the-power-of-defaults-in-how-we-eat/
The DOJ should really be looking at things like YouTube, which doesn't make any profit (I don't believe) but since Google proper supports it, no one can compete with it. That might be why Google is pushing so hard against ad blockers, they need to make YouTube profitable to avoid prosecution.
So as you are insinuating things why not be clear and name it? What is it, corruption? Or do you think that the fact that AOL deal wasn't considered illegal, no deal ever will be and Apple/Google are free to do as they please? Your idea of justice is quite weird.
You can make your substantive points without that, so if you'd please do so instead, we'd be grateful.
When that Google-AOl deal Google wasn’t even close to as popular as it is now. It was a simple distribution deal. People are tunneled in on the iPhone because that’s Apple’s juggernaut now but this deal with Apple also goes back to like 2002 when I was still convincing people to switch off Yahoo and MSN to Google. They also made a similar deal with Mozilla which is still basically how Mozilla is still able to operate at all.
I mean 2002 Yahoo probably could have outspent 2002 Google. 2002 Microsoft definitely could have and it’s not like MSN was a juggernaut, but they were complacent. I’ll just say it: Google wanted it more. Search and Advertising was basically all they were at the time, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube or any of that other stuff we associate with them now, and they went out and took the opportunities they could. They developed a toolbar for IE users, setup distribution deals for the toolbar, put it in the Firefox directory, and sought out new avenues of information to index like when they acquired Deja News and Blogger, and subsequently launched Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google News, Alerts, Images, Patents, GOOG-411, etc. Even acquiring and developing Android was a play that ensured even if their relationships went south and Microsoft came to dominate Mobile in a way that was beginning to look a lot more possible in 2006 (and not so much in 2011) they would never be entirely locked out of Mobile if that ever became a thing (which uh, spoiler alert, it did).
And when did Google really start to look like the juggernaut in the room? Well in Jan 2005 they had 35.1% of the search market to Yahoo’s 31.8% and a year later Google was at 41.4% to Yahoo’s 28.7%.[1] So probably you could say sometime about 2004 around when they IPO’d, maybe, is the soonest you could say they were really a juggernaut. That’s dominance but that sure isn’t anything close to a monopoly, and they were just outcompeting in both quality and distribution and in their search and ad product offerings. Acquiring DoubleClick even after Microsoft bid up the price was also a pretty good hat trick that was like a rocket booster for their ad business, putting Microsoft in a position where they had to spend almost twice as much for aQuantive only to write it down 5 years later.
This is why antitrust law is so scuffed. The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge. They’re going to lose hard while playing up whatever small victories they can get along the way while wasting a lot of money in court and then the administration is going to change again which might continue any cases in progress but is still going to have its political priorities shift.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in...
Your whole argument hinges on this and I fail to find a problem in it. What's OK when you have 1% of the market is, by law and reason, not OK when you have 99% of the market. It seems fully logical that that also means old contracts and behavior might need change.
Google’s core business is search and advertising and they have worked from the company’s inception to acquire users and customers in both, successfully, and more so than their competition both earlier in their history and later and they have developed business partners along the way who value that continued business relationship.
Making deals isn’t illegal and businesses make deals all the time. The Sherman Antitrust Act declares contracts that restrain trade and commerce illegal, but Google isn’t restraining trade: they’re paying a fair market value for user acquisition and their largest competitors both know what that price is and are unwilling to outbid Google.
Up until 2017, Microsoft even had their own deal with Apple where Siri used Bing results and you couldn’t change that (still can’t control what Siri uses actually, but Siri is garbage). Even so, you can still change the search provider in Safari and Apple only receives money from Google for Safari users when Safari users actually use Google making this more like an affiliate program.
[1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848
And again- no one has made the determination that it is illegal. The DOJ believes it's illegal, but the DOJ doesn't decide what's illegal. We're literally having the trial to figure it out.
So, you're relying on overly simplistic assumptions that are misleading you.
You can easily get the legal arguments, they're on Wikipedia, they're on the doj website, they're on the indictments. The information just needs you to go out and get it.
I am definitely going to use that. And since I teach ninth graders, I predict I will be using that on a daily basis. Blessings upon you. (And the curses of ~175 9th graders every year.)
Bueller?...Bueller....
Sentiment shift. Moral Compass in Silicon Valley ( or more like in the Tech Sector ), Smartphone Revolution and 15 years of zero interest rate.
None of the reported are really "news" apart from the precise 36% figure which is higher than most of our initial estimate. "Customer acquisition cost" isn't new. On a similar note Google also share their Ad revenue with Mozilla / Firefox.
We might not like a lot of what's going on with Google or Apple. But I dont think revenue share is in anyway wrong or illegal.
That’s not the case, though. What some people complain about is the fact that other browsers must use the WebKit engine, but there is nothing stopping people from putting browsers in the App Store. This is not relevant to this deal. The engine does not matter at all, what matters is the user base.
Apple has been holding back web development for many years with this policy. I suspect it is to keep PWAs from being competitive with native apps, but whatever the motivation, that is very much the effect.
It’s a thin line between revenue sharing, which is fine, and anticompetitive bribes to entrench your dominant position and extinguish competition, which is not. I am not saying that it’s the second case, but that’s what the DoJ wants to prove.
Do you ever speed on the highway? Have you gotten a ticket for every time you did it? Just because you didn't get caught doesn't mean it's legal.
Except the networks pay the leagues to broadcast games. With so-called "tech" companies, this is reversed. Google is paying Apple and Samsung so that no other search engine gets to be the pre-installed default.
Sports leagues do not pay TV networks in order to prevent other leagues from doing deals with the networks. But Google pays hardware manufacturers to be the pre-instaled default and exclude other search engines.
Well yes making that data public _will_ undermine Google's competitive standing. But that standing was obtained illegally through years of obstructing price discovery despite running a giant ad exchange with auctions that are supposed to be based upon honest numbers.
But by now the market has probably already priced in the impact of these revelations?
But also price discovery for competition and content. E.g. Google feeds a ton of Wikipedia content to iOS users through search results. If Wikipedia knew how large the private Apple-Google deal was, maybe they’d ask for a cut or throttle usage.
>We’re committed to keeping your personal information safe. That’s why we innovate ways to safeguard your privacy on your device, why we’re up front about how we personalize your experience, and why we equip developers with the best tools to protect your data.[0]
Subtly left out that 36% cut they get from making a data collection company the first thing you see in thier app, huh?
[0]https://www.apple.com/ge/privacy/approach-to-privacy/
Also, searching for something isn't necessarily "your personal information" except for when you type in stuff about yourself.
> All those developers complaining about Apple’s 70/30 split for App Store revenue should take note: even Google only gets a 64/36 split for search.
Google's payments are being brought up in a trial where the government is suggesting that 36% is a massive amount of money to pay and is evidence of Google's willingness to pay billions of dollars and a massive percentage of their search revenue just to maintain a monopoly over iOS search.
The followup question is, if 36% of Safari search revenue is the cost of buying a search monopoly on iPhone, and if that's considered to be such a large amount of money to pay that it's evidence of how much Google values being the default search on iOS, then are developers getting something equivalent for their 30%? App developers pay 30% of their iOS revenue and they get way fewer benefits. If 36% is the price of a monopoly, iOS has got developers paying 30% just for access to the platform. But maybe if devs paid an extra 6% Apple would install them by default on every iPhone?
The iOS app store is a separate conversation and I don't think it should be compared to Google's payments. The context of both payment structures is different, and I don't want to act like they are directly comparable. But it is weird to me that anyone would suggest that comparing them somehow makes the app store payments look good. You're paying monopoly-level prices just to be listed on the store; if you're comparing the two then Google is getting a much better deal here than iOS developers are getting.
I mean, heck, I'll pay Apple 36% of all iOS revenue I ever make if they're willing to make my apps the default out-of-the-box experience on every single phone that they sell.
People do talk about how “Google is legitimately better than the competition”[1] while ignoring the competition that never happens because there’s no path to profitability due to googl’s entrenched position.
[1] which isn’t even necessarily true anymore: Google’s search results are awful these days and have been for years, because Google’s no longer competing on search it’s competing on ads.
Absolutely agree. One of the reasons I switched to Kagi.
Though I find I use search very little now. If I just want to know something I don't Google it anymore, I just ask chatgpt. Because it will give me an actual answer instead of a long list of clickbait sites I have to sift through to find my answer.
The only time search still makes sense to me is when I need to find an actual website which is actually not all that often.
But then I believe Google wasn’t thinking Apple could do it well at all. I think Google is sure of - is the typical Apple customer base that will just gobble up whatever Apple shoves down their throat, heartily. Yeah, I think it’s this one :)
And it could even rival Google if they don't have to optimize for increasing ad revenue.
Sure search was a research problem 30 years ago, but most competent undergrads can design a search engine now. You need engineering power to scale it and admins to keep it running.
Besides I won’t call it a service. I would call their substandard iCloud a service.
You know what let’s talk about macOS and since we are talking about search let’s talk about Spotlight. God, everything is awful about it. What is worse is that you don’t even know what is happening.
Suddenly your apps stopped turning up in search? Well there are interesting ways suggested on Apple support site to try. No didn’t work? Of course it didn’t. Then why not remove everything and then add the full disk and let it index and then remove it again and then try the selection you want to keep. Naah, didn’t work. That’s fine, it’s normal. Restart it. No no, do it couple of times. It takes few restarts for the indexing engine to get all warmed up. Oh you rather called Apple support? Yeah, they would do it properly. After helping you wipe your Mac twice the next step in the workflow is guiding you through the steps to drop your Mac at a service centre and you’ll get it back in a week or two with some magic sauce poured inside.
It worked? Yup. Apple does it right every single time.
It didn’t? You must be doing something wrong.
Because it’s not “will Apple come up with something that makes Google Search obsolete”, it’s “will Apple come up with something that diminishes search traffic from iOS devices?
That isn't how relationships work, regardless of sophistication.
There was a link yesterday about bug bounties, so here's a story from my time handling bug bounties:
1. A major website published a policy setting out their payment schedule for various types of vulnerabilities.
2. A particular researcher submitted an issue which he plausibly characterized as falling into a high-value class of vulnerabilities. He received an award based on that classification.
3. The same guy continued to find vulnerabilities on that platform. He would always include a discussion of how to use his new vulnerability to implement an attack in the high-value category. There was an obvious reason for this: his typical vulnerability was a bog-standard cross site scripting attack, and XSS was specifically listed in the payment schedule as less valuable than the attack type this researcher wanted to be paid for.
4. Every time one of these reports came in, I would forward it to the company with the note "This is a standard cross-site scripting attack, and your policy specifies that it is worth a bounty of $XXX. The researcher notes that this vulnerability can be used to implement an attack with effect Y, and he is correct, but this is true of all cross-site scripting attacks on your site."
5. Then the company would pay out the higher-value bounty.
So this is an example of the value of the report being set unambiguously in public, and a large, "sophisticated" company deliberately ignoring that because they didn't want to adjust their relationship with one particular researcher. (Other researchers reporting identical vulnerabilities didn't know the magic words; they got the listed payout for XSS.)
The vast majority of rich people in the world use iPhones. In the US/Canada/UK/Australia/Japan and many more rich countries, the iPhone is the most common device - and even within those countries, the iPhone's demographics skew wealthier. iPhone users are a ton more valuable to advertisers than Android users - they have more money and they're willing to pay for premium things.
Let's say Apple switched to Bing. Most users won't know how to change their search settings so Bing will now get 90%+ of iPhone search traffic (and the most valuable search traffic). This puts rocket fuel into Bing's ad business. Advertisers don't just think Google and nothing else. Suddenly, Bing is potentially more important since iPhone (and Mac) users that they want to reach are going through Bing.
This has big implications for Google's ad business beyond just traffic loss. When we're talking about bidding, more bidders push up the price. It's not just about losing the iPhone's traffic. It's also about losing the ad bidders on the other side. If you're a monopoly on search ads and you lose 30% of your search traffic to a competitor, you are probably losing a lot more than 30% of your revenue. This is because part of your revenue exists due to people getting outbid. Let's say that you and I are bidding for the "laptop" keyword. You bid $1 and I bid $2 to outbid you. Google gets $2. If I decide to move my bidding over to Bing, you get the laptop keyword for $1 and Google's revenue is halved for that keyword - and they're only getting 70% as much traffic on top of that. As traffic shifts, bidders will shift. As bidders shift, the amount paid for the traffic still coming to Google could decline in addition to their traffic declining. So it's not just the loss of Apple-device traffic. It's the loss of bidders that drive up the price of ads even when they lose.
And this has knock-on effects for Google's businesses. If Bing's search ads get this rocket fuel, they start getting the attention to take on Google's ad business for publishers. Google has been steering searches to their properties, but all of a sudden Bing could start steering searches to Microsoft owned properties. Maybe LinkedIn figures out how to get people to post videos in a YouTube-competitive way - and with the most valuable traffic being steered toward those videos. Yea, LinkedIn is supposed to be professional, but it's kinda lost a lot of that over time with random click bait already.
Being the default search engine is a powerful position. You might say that you'd use Google no matter what and we're on HN so you probably know how to change the default search engine. Most people would just end up going along with whatever the default is. Google rose to prominence via their search results, but people aren't feeling as happy about Google's search today. Google has kept their dominance by paying to be the default search engine for almost everyone - either by paying Apple and Mozilla or by paying engineers to create Chrome (and putting a lot of marketing money behind it).
The clock is ticking to break up Google, and it is going to be a sight to behold.
That's tautological
disclaimer: Googler here(not in search PA), this is my personal opinion.
The EU would have serious problems with that because of the way Apple used the Music.app > Apple Music transition to basically crowbar themselves into the music streaming market.
Google knows that there is some percentage of iPhone users who will only ever search with the default Safari engine. Google really wants those users. Google is paying to make sure those users use Google.
I mean, that is definitionally “customer acquisition cost,” right? Or am I missing something?
https://support.apple.com/en-jo/HT204683
"Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot."
Because this seems like an honest mistake made by an academic who probably isn't used to the pressure of being a witness in a massive antitrust trial? It doesn't seem like he intentionally used his place on the stand to leak information that he knew he shouldn't or anything like that. But there's a good chance that mistake just made him an enemy in the form of a trillion dollar mega-corp, and I don't think it's unreasonable for some legal protections to be extended to him for it.
For starters, Kevin Murphy is an external expert witness and not on the payroll of Google. During trials like this, it is expected to hire outside expert witnesses to testify why party X’s thing is “good actually” and why party Y got it wrong.
So Mr. Murphy will be fine.
Secondly, witnesses, expert or otherwise, are indeed compelled to answer questions when on the stand. It would otherwise be quite useless to put them on the stand in the first place.
What happens in cases like this, however, is that there are parts that occur only in front of the judge and the two parties for confidentiality reasons and parts that happen in public for everyone in the gallery to hear.
It’s the job of the lawyers to pay attention to the questions asked to ensure that questions that could lead to answers with confidential information are answered behind closed doors. Witnesses aren’t expected to keep track of this when answering questions unless explicitly briefed by the court to save specific topics for the confidential part of the cross/direct examination.
So the ones that screwed up are the lawyers, perhaps the court, but not the expert witness.
Google as evolved into the number one product search engine. It's doesn't have ay advantage in actual search anymore. DDG, plain Bing and reskins/whitelabels like Ecosia deliver the exact same quality of result and often better, but I suspect that's because there's greater value manipulating Google results. What they can't do is compete with the search engine powering Google ads.
The ongoing R&D cost for the Pixel line has to be much more than the cost of developing and running Google Domains.