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Facebook failed to pay the big money to Apple that they should have been paying for years.

If Zuck had been handing Apple $5,000,000,000 per year as google does, then Apple would never have kneecapped Facebook.

Larry and Sergei know how the protection racket works. You pay your dues to the local mob, you get to do business in their street corners.

What do google pay Apple $5b for? Ummm… to be in the search of Safari. Yeah right. They all know google simply pays Apple because they don’t want no trouble, so they say “Safari”, write a huge cheque, and google gets to keep doing business in Apple devices.

Tim is The Godfather. He who owns the platform owns the city. Everyone must respect and pay their dues, if they want to do business in this city.

Apple has sent Facebook to sleep with the fishes because zuck didn’t show no respect and didn’t pay no dues.

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This is double bullshit:

1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they should've done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being tracked, or liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking provides, they would not have opted out.

2. Google is subject to exactly the same rules as Facebook is. Their apps have to ask for permission to track as Facebook's do, and Safari (which enforces privacy in many ways, too) is the same for google.com as for facebook.com.

They pay Apple for being search provider in Safari and Siri the same way they pay Mozilla, because searches mean data and displayed adverts.

> 1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they should've done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being tracked, or liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking provides, they would not have opted out.

The choice existed for a long time. What Apple did was make that choice front and centre for everyone, as opposed to being buried in a settings menu for privacy-conscious people to hunt down.

Google doesn't really have apps though. Their users see ads through the browser and so, from what I understand, are unaffected by the change.

Not counting gmail, calendar, or the docs/drive suite, Google has >12 applications on the app store. Apple's "search" is pretty crappy WRT seeing what a dev has released (or at least the Google LLC "dev"), hence the range.

And ads definitely show up in YouTube and such.

Apple's "search" is pretty crappy WRT seeing what a dev has released

Click on the dev's name and it shows everything that dev has published.

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/google-llc/id281956209

I did (on my phone, fwiw), and it only showed 12, and not their big ones.

Perhaps because on your phone it shows only phone apps?

Well, it didn't show Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets, or Docs. All of which are Google apps available on the phone.

I didn't say they had no apps. I said they don't really have apps and they don't. Their main product is search and it's accessed through the browser.

If what FB is saying is true then the move by Apple helps Google. There's more or less two options for online advertising. So if companies spend less on FB then they're probably going to spend those dollars with Google

I give you Google, the app:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942

Google search, in an iOS app. Not everyone uses it, sure, but has over 341k reviews. Facebook, as a point of comparison, only has about 4x more reviews at 1.2M. 4x is a lot, but it's also a lot less than I'd expect over something primarily used in the browser.

Google doesn't really have apps though

Google has 17 apps for Apple devices.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-one/id1451784328

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/screenwise-meter/id1455562397

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notable-women-ar/id1425071635

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-a-line-draw-in-ar/id13672...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-tasks-get-things-done/i...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/looker-mobile/id1533498070

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-podcasts/id1398000105

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-stadia/id1471900213

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-fit-activity-tracker/id...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-fi/id1413936031

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-code/id13...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-keep-notes-and-lists/id...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-tv/id1193350206

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-kids/id936971630

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-watch-listen-stream/id...

Part of the issue is the language. Apple used the “ask no to track language”, but when it came to their own services chose “turn off personalized ads”:

https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/02/apple-personalized-ads-target...

Not saying tracking shouldn’t be stopped. But remember Apple is much less privacy aware when it’s their wallet.

Is the issue the language? It's not clear from the language or the article that Apple's version disables any tracking at all. It seems like two different things.

How could you possibly server personalized ads without tracking?

Why would disabling personalized ads necessarily disable tracking? [EDIT] Consider: toggling the display of something does not necessarily change the underlying data, or data collection, behavior.

Why would all data used to personalize ads have to be tracking? It could also be things like purchase data from the very service that's advertising to you. Halting collection—not use for ad personalization, but collection—of that would go beyond what even I would consider tracking (and I think most of what goes on in the ad world today should simply be illegal). It would be possible to personalize ads only based on this kind of thing—in fact, that's what the article seems to imply is going on, at least in part.

So there are at least two ways that setting might mean something different from one that disables tracking.

I think we are coming at it from different directions. You need tracking for personalized ads, you don't need personalized ads for tracking.

No you don’t need tracking for personalized ads. Apple defines tracking as sharing information about the user between distinct 3rd parties, while it personalizes ads based on your behavior within Apple’s own services.

Right. Consider:

>>>

What do you do for a living?

"I track animals."

Oh, cool, like you're a hunter or in animal control or something? Trekking all over the wilds, keen eye for detail, grand adventures, lots of mud and amazing stories?

"No, I manage a zoo. I track the zoo animals in a spreadsheet. I sit in an office."

>>>

AFAIK Apple means the hunting kind, when they write "tracking". As in following a user around and watching them while they use services & apps that you don't operate.

Sort of. Again, it's possible to personalize ads without tracking, unless tracking means "collecting literally any data, including order history for a logged-in user" or things like selecting ads based on geography for an address that you provided, not even GPS tracking or something like that.

It is entirely possible that the settings do totally different things, so the different language isn't some kind of trick. I think it's likely that picking either of those phrases and using it for both would result in the description of the respective settings being less accurate.

Swap the one that applies to applications to "disable personalized ads", rather than "disable tracking".

But it doesn't do that—does it? It disables (a certain kind of) tracking. The tracking may not even be used for ads. Apple has no way to guarantee that. You may still see personalized ads based on other data.

Make the Apple one "disable tracking" rather than "disable personalized ads". But the setting might not do that at all, while still disabling personalization. In fact, the ad personalization may not have been based on tracking in the first place, and even if it were, disabling personalization could very well leave the tracking in place.

The accusation was that Apple's describing the same thing two ways to give themselves an advantage, but I'd say the settings very likely do not do the same thing.

That's definitely not why they pay Mozilla. Being the default search engine in a browser that a minuscule percentage of the market uses, and then the vast majority of those only use because they're hostile to Google, isn't worth shit.

If I go to my bodega once a month to spend $80 on sticks of $2 incense, it's because I'm buying drugs.

There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as those in Google search results) and display advertising such as Facebook and Googles Display Network.

I assure you Google are paying Apple to be the default search engine exactly because it's basically a licence to print money.

It has nothing to do with display ads.

If Facebook had a search engine they would bid against Google for that role, but as it appears to be the case there is a Google/Facebook gentlemens agreement to not compete in that area.

Have to wonder if that agreement would have survived a competitive Google Plus.

Well yeah, Google tried to build a social network (actually several) and failed; Facebook didn't try to build a search engine - that wouldn't fit into their business model of sucking you in and driving you to sign up to Facebook. I mean, after they bought Oculus, they even started requiring a FB account to use the device, but they couldn't have done that for a search engine, nobody would have used it. But lots of others did, and failed (or at least couldn't compete with Google).

So we can conclude that neither building a successful social network nor building a successful search engine is easy :)

Yet Google tries really hard to get you to log in, to the point where if you log into the browser to be able to sync your bookmarks and settings, you will be logged into your Google search as well.

but fb does have a search engine? Admittedly it only searches for content on their own site, but as you note the strategy has been to make the walled garden so expansive that users would never want to leave (or be able to --- see India). Building a general purpose web search engine would be to give up on the "own everything" strategy.

Given the "success" of Google+ and Bing I am not sure if it is a gentleman's agreement rather than an endeavor not worth the investment.

Frankly, I would be surprised if it weren't both

FB could surely muster the engineering resources to create a search engine that matches what Google has today.

I think OP is right, it is pride that is holding Zuck back.

>FB could surely muster the engineering resources to create a search engine that matches what Google has today.

I wouldn't be so sure. Bing is an excellent counter example to that statement. And not just because (from my experience) it doesn't produce the same quality of results. It's also about user adoption. MS built a reasonable, if not clearly superior alternative to Google and spend enormous sums of money marketing it, making it the default option on the default browser installed on millions of new PC's each year, and is has single-digit market share.

Facebook doesn't have those inroads on the PC market to leverage. They'd have to build something so much better than Google that it would make Google look like Yahoo when Google first arrived on the scene. At which point Google could probably stop sandbagging their own search efforts that favor ads space over results and make up any lost ground pretty quickly.

I'm also not confident in Facebook's ability to create high quality new products anymore. The most recent big successes have come from acquisitions. I suppose they might be able to buy DDG, but they'd almost immediately lose all of its users. And unless the still wanted to build their own actual engine, they'd have to rely on the goodwill of MS to continue getting most results via Bing's engine.

>There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as those in Google search results) and display advertising such as Facebook and Googles Display Network.

I assure you HN does not understand anything about Ads. Ever since I realise HN had some deep misunderstanding with Online ads, I have been stating this difference for over 3 years. The only thing I got on HN was all ads are evil. Targeting Ads, Tracking Ads, Search Ads, or the latest buzzword surveillance capitalism.

Since I detect sarcasm, I'm not sure how to respond.

As someone who chooses Apple partly because of the comparative privacy versus Android I'm actually quite happy that they bargain with other parties? It reminiscent of the working of efficient markets. I have a choice. No privacy (Google, Facebook), or a tidbit (Apple, G/F via Apple) or a lot (custom ROM options, drop all G/F/A). For a tidbit of privacy I pay more, but how much I pay more is lowered by the incoming cashflow at Apple due to these arrangements. So there is a cafateria model with a powerful party bargaining on my behalf and in line with my preferences. For me, that's glass half full.

You don't have a choice with Apple, and that's at the crux of the definition of privacy. What you're doing is justifying a specific choice that you've made, by assuming good faith and bad faith with certain companies - take a few minutes to read up on recent news and you can easily see that they do make anti-privacy choices. Their aim is not user privacy, but user lock-in. But convincing us that it's in our best interest is what's called marketing. There is no 'bargaining' going on, there is no cafetaria, nor are your best interests in anyone's minds. It's simply a gray area in which your data is the currency.

Privacy is not achieved through brand loyalty, it can only be achieved through understanding what you've got and taking control of it. It dismays me to see attitudes like this so prevalent in today's privacy conversations, I feel it will be 10 years too late before we collectively realize what a mistake we're making.

> You don't have a choice with Apple

A choice about what? Your privacy? Privacy is not a choice, it's a right, so if that's what you mean I don't really understand.

How does good privacy engineering at the platform level have any effect on lock-in?

It is abundantly clear that Apple loves locking people in, and also clear that they love taunting their advantages over their competitors. But I just don’t see how the better engineered platform protections for privacy have anything to do with the lock-in (no network effects, no switching costs)

My favorite example of this is the Find My network: did they totally screw Tile in their own competitive interests? Absolutely. Does their end-to end-encrypted Find My network have state of the art cryptographic design to minimize data collection? Absolutely.

Privacy also has concrete value for Apple. Apple made a fair argument that the Health app is HIPAA compliant because while the backend is nothing special, the syncing is end to end encrypted.

They do make mistakes, and they are a large self-interested corrupt terrible bad corporation, but I am happy that they are pushing the industry forward.

It's really interesting to see certain Apple users justify how Apple's choices are always the right one (even when they are diametrically opposite to Apple's choice from a few months ago, at which point they also defended the Apple choice as the right one).

And I say this as a long time Apple user, both on macs and iPhones.

What would that payment be for from Facebook?

Opinions aside, Google are paying for a thing, not just donating money. What would Facebook pay for? I'm not sure that them being a search engine makes sense, I don't think Apple would give up the position of iMessage in favour of Messenger.

(Disclaimer, I work at Google, but don't have any inside info or opinion on the Apple/Google relationship.)

> What would that payment be for from Facebook?

To live.

This is Tim’s town and if you think you’re doing business and cutting Tim out then you’ve got $10b concrete boots coming.

I think Google as the default search engine on Safari is a big win.

How is that just an excuse to hand over money?

Do think that putting DuckDuckGo as default in Safari will not have any influence in either DuckDuckGo or Google market share?

Right, like as without those 5B Apple would screw up its products by handing over all search to some guy with a Bing scraping Perl script cosplaying as a search engine.

I'm not sure if you're shitposting or actually replying. Alphabet pays Apple to be the default search-engine in Safari. Thats it, Google are not exempt from Apples privacy policies. Google dragged their feed after the iOS 15 privacy changes, but in the end had to cave.

Apple's privacy policies are not set in stone. They are more like pray I don't alter the deal further.

ATM only Apple can stop Apple from deciding they want no tracking done by search engine providers in iOS apps.

Please stop creating accounts to post unsubstantive comments and flamebait. It destroys what this place is supposed to be for, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Wasn't there a time where you could sign in to facebook at the system level? They could pay to get it back

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/understanding-facebook-integrati...

> I'm not sure that them being a search engine makes sense

It really does. Want to search for a local house cleaner or children's entertainer, include Facebook pages with web results. Want to search for things to do in a particular town, include Facebook events with web results about museums and such like.

This is just scratching the surface too. There are lots of possibilities here so I'd be very surprised if Facebook haven't explored this idea.

Then, why does google pay big money to Firefox?

To avoid a competition lawsuit from the justice department.

It's rackets all the way down!

I think you mean: Its Webkits all the way down

Do you suggest that Google apps on iOS are somehow exempt from new privacy protections?

It wouldn't be that straightforward

Probably what OP is suggesting is that in return for that $5B, Apple will call up Google and say "hey we're adding these new privacy protections, will that be a problem?" and Google will have time in advance to get around them

For Apple, which has a market cap of over $3 trillion, the $10B from Google is the equivalent of sofa cushion money.

Apple isn’t going do any favors for Google for a measly $10B.

It’s much more meaningful for Google and Google knows it. For them, it’s a bargain, as it gives its advertisers access to customers who actually spend money.

You're comparing income with market cap. Apple's net income in 2021 was around $100B of which $10B is a significant sum.

Google has an easier time providing targeted ads via search keywords. Facebook users spend most of their time in their feeds which is a relatively weak signal for monetization.

Note that google appears to be acting as though they are effected, you can see this in their push for FLOC/topics (but the impetus for this could be coming from android moreso than search)

This suggests Google should charge FB a few billion per year, lest they implement the same feature in Android. They could spin it as a research partnership to investigate the social effects of platform tracking. As long as partners keep paying, the research can continue, but once they stop paying it's time to act on the research results...

Thing is on Android, hardly anyone pays for everything. No money from iOS, no money... Many people i know say that Facebook ads simply stopped working. You pour in $100K and... nothing happens.

Users have the same privacy options with Google's apps that they have with Facebook's apps.

But Google are much, much less dependent on apps because they get all that sweet juicy search data from each iPhone (which they can then use to track you across their apps, potentially (this is possible to implement, I have no idea if they do it)).

So antitrust regulators should break up Google?

They should regulate them better, certainly. I'm agnostic on whether that means they should be broken up.

It isn't $5B, it is $10B+. Google's TAC in 2021 was $13B.

OK so Google pays Apple around $13,000,000,000 per year.

How much does Facebook pay Apple?

A tiny bit with their in App revenue split which Facebook tries to avoid. Although I doubt paying for it make much difference. You can tell Tim Cook and Apple, just like HN hate Facebook and Ads ( Which they have to backtrack and state they dont hate ads ). It is an ideology crash.

No, it is not an ideology crash. Apple is perfectly fine serving their own ads for which they are building a targeting profile.

It is an incentive crash. Apple tried iAds before and it didn't work as they couldn't do good personalised ads, this is them keeping the advantage just for them and getting good PR.

Apple is not a saint in this, not even a single bit.

5B? Nah, champ. The price is 15B ...

Only true in the US though.

dang can you please enforce the rules more? In the last weeks hn is getting overrun with spammy troll accounts splattering conspiracy theories left and right.

This is unfortunately a remarkably well-documented conspiracy theory.

Something isn't a conspiracy theory just because it's an opinion that you do not like. I personally found the OPs take interesting, though obviously written a little tongue-in-cheek.

The relationship between Google and Apple is outrageous, criminal even. Yet for some reason it hasn't dawned on the Economist. Maybe some clear spoken shitposts on a popular tech site is what it takes.

it's a conspiracy theory because he presents it as facts without providing sources for his statements. it's about how not what. yikes.

> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory?lang=en

It's not a conspiracy when we know that GAFA works together: https://gizmodo.com/google-paid-apple-to-stay-out-of-the-sea...

It is because you can't validate it how is it that hard to distinguish between true statements and speculations. The same goes for your sources claims brought up in court are not true statements until they are proven to be factually correct.

You’re basically saying every comment here is a conspiracy theory, since (essentially) nobody here provides sources and everybody is convinced they’re spewing the unadulterated truth.

By your definition, it’s a conspiracy theory for me to say, “I’m sure JFK was shot!” Because I’m saying it as fact without source. But then it’s also a conspiracy theory to say, “I’m sure JFK was shot by aliens.”

The what is essential in defining a conspiracy theory.

It's about how not what at least follow the discussion you are answering. And nobody cares about your definition of conspiracy theories or your assumption of mine, normal human beings open for discourse care about the definition of the term in the general public. You can easily find it in a dictionary of your choice.

No.

Google the definition of conspiracy, before presenting your wrong opinion as fact.

Do you even get the irony of what you've just done and I'm sure have been doing for years? Probably not.

How about a bit of critical thinking before yelling "Conspiracy!"? Concerning "sources", if Apple and Google are engaged in joint anti-competitive behavior, they'd probably not write press releases about it. But of course there is well-documented precedence of them doing exactly that, being caught and getting a mild slap on the wrist, so it's not a completely outlandish notion to entertain.

As for the officially stated reason: do you really think that there is an alternative search engine provider that Apple would switch to if Google didn't pay them 10 figures a year? If so, which one(s)? If not, what are they actually paying for? To mitigate the risk of a second Apple Maps? But is the case for entering the search engine market really remotely as compelling as entering the mapping space?

I'm not saying it's an open and shut case, but the idea that Google essentially pays Apple money a) as a "good-will gesture" b) to give regulators the impression that the search engine market is more competitive than it is seems possible to me. Whereas one of the alternative scenarios proposed here, that Apple would pick duckduckgo otherwise, really does not.

Personally, if I were Sundar, I'd be way more worried about anti-trust or Apple siding too much with the privacy of their users or stepping otherwise on my toes than say duckduckduckgo becoming a serious competitor because Apple anointed them default search provider after I failed to fork over enough money. I'd probably even do my best to keep a bunch of minimally viable competitors around -- not viable enough to ever pose a threat, but viable enough to keep anti-trust at bay for a bit longer. And both duckduckgo and firefox seem to fit that bill perfectly.

You are speculating as much as the op does. It's just not based in truthful statements. Ofc everything you and op are rhyming together can be true but at least don't state it as fact like op did.

Pretend that everyone that you interact with on the internet is expressing their opinion about the facts.

I think this was more shitpost than conspiracy.

> E-commerce was an area where we saw a meaningful slowdown in growth in Q4. And similarly, we've seen other areas like gaming to be challenged. But on e-commerce, it's quite noticeable -- notable that Google called out, seeing strength in that very same vertical. And so given that we know that e-commerce is one of the most impacted verticals from iOS restrictions, it makes sense that those restrictions are probably part of the explanation for the difference between what they were seeing and what we were seeing.

> ... we believe those restrictions from Apple are designed in a way that carves out browsers from the tracking prompts Apple requires for apps. And so what that means is that search ads could have access to far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes than app-based ad platforms like ours.

> So when it comes to using data, you can think of it that it's not really apples-to-apples for us. And as a result, we believe Google Search ad business could have benefited relative to services like ours is based a different set of restrictions from Apple. And given that Apple continue to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to continue.

Facebook CFO on iOS change effects: advertising business is being driven to Google since they are mostly unaffected by the changes. This is the statement the article would be based on, but with most of the interesting parts left out.

This is amazing! I love HN.

How so?

Safari hides so much info from google search by default. The money google pays apple is strictly for marketing purposes.

https://gizmodo.com/google-paid-apple-to-stay-out-of-the-sea...

I know that story but safari iOS is not like safari on macOS.

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