Like my colleague Constantine von Hoffman, who looks at the DOJ’s case against Google, I am not a lawyer. But here’s the part that smells fishy (even though it isn’t news).
Google paid Apple $20 billion dollars to be the default search engine in the Safari browser on iPhones. If Apple had installed an alternative search engine, that engine would be serving something like 60% of smartphones in the U.S., 30% worldwide. With Google as the search engine on both iPhone and Android, it has mobile search pretty well sewn up.
But paying Apple to be their search engine is surely a bit like my bank paying me interest to use their credit card or the MTA paying me to ride mass transit. Surely in a normal world Apple is the customer here. Google admits that that $20 billion was well spent.
Kim Davis
Editor at large
