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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

How likely is it that Apple would relinquish those 15% to 20% of their profits that are now coming from Google? Not very I would guess.

I could see them coming up with some sort of privacy friendly ad targeting system using on-device matching or differential privacy.

So they solve the privacy problem but there will still be ads (unless you buy their "Apple Ad Free Experience" service for $10 per month)

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On the other hand Apple might happily accept those payments for now, but realize that they won't keep coming forever.

It's quite possible that DOJ antitrust action would prevent Google from paying to be a preferred search engine in the future. Once Google isn't paying you, why not provide your own search engine (and cut Google off from that valuable data stream)?

Or Google turns sates evidence and blames that nasty monopolist Apple for extracting the Vig from them, and suggests that Apple must have a ballot in Mac OS and IOS a bit like MS

Given that Google also pays Mozilla about the same amount, it would be hard to prove that Apple's "extracting" it from them. Google very much wants to be able to pay all the browser makers to be the search engine of choice. Nobody has to extract anything from them.

Absolutely, but I really doubt that Apple will just shrug its shoulders about the lost profits and throw in an ad-free search engine for the price an iPhone.

My prediction is that they will try to monetise this somehow. And the most likely way to do this is via some privacy friendly advertising model (or an ad/subscription hybrid). They're already doing it with Apple News.

> unlike Google, it’s not reliant on advertising income, which benefits from personalized data with which to target users.

I'm unsure as to whether they would seriously create a new ad platform, but a key tenant of the company's culture is not relying on advertising for revenue.

Except the massive revenue from Google ads via Google.

They did exactly this when they ditched Google Maps, turning down billions of dollars in revenue, spending billions of dollars to build out their own service, simply to prevent Google harvesting Apple user location data.

I don't think Maps is anywhere near as profitable as search.

That’s true, but it doesn’t mean Apple won’t or can’t do the same thing with search as they did maps. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but they do have a track record of doing right by their users.

BTW their maps revenue from Google was a bigger share of total revenue when they gave it up than their search revenue is now.

These payments have been under increasing scrutiny from trustbusters the past few years. It's not gonna keep flowing.

edit: I misread a thing.

Apple made over a quarter trillion dollars in profits in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income...), and gets somewhere around $10B from Google. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/apple-services-success-story...)

They can certainly afford to ditch the partnership.

That was pre-tax income. Apple's profit for 2019 was $55 billion.

You're right. Ack.

Given which, it's interesting this was announced now - just in time to conveniently give Google a hotline to a "See! Not really a monopoly!" defence.

How much money would ads that are broadly targeted (city, gender, age bracket) like Google used to, be able to make relative to the uber personalized Google/Favebook ads?

I believe you confuse revenue with profit

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