Apple exec Eddy Cue set to testify in Google trial about $19B search deal

It'll be interesting to see if the courts actually enforce the law, or if these cases get decided on political influence instead. Previous testimony in this case is pretty damning for Google, since it implies their ad business is built on multiple levels of fraud. That ought to be enough to get them to lose the case.

Time will tell. Happily, it's possible for all three of those players to be found guilty. It's not an either/or situation.

How much Google pays to Apple is directly proportional to how much Google needs to be on Apple devices to maintain search hegemony.

Apple is being paid for being popular. The economics of maintaining a search monopoly are weird.

Most alternatives, end-up using hacky safari extensions that hijack the query to Google and force a redirect.

You and I would change our search engine but most iPhone users need an apple-maps-level mess up to go switch from the defaults (and even then that’s stabilized to a majority apple share now). Bing+apple could have been an existential threat to them in the mobile era; without android they would’ve had to pay whatever apple wanted.

Not to mention that Google can do first party ad injection on results to shift people towards Android, decreasing the cost per user for impressions and sucking more data out of them to again, fuel the ad machine.

Apple is getting a 'crap free' google search results currently.

* or more accurately keep it in the development phase for almost a decade now.

They've kind of been building all the pieces over the years with spotlight integrations/etc...

In the search wars Google is the entrenched and slowly dying search engine with a lot of up and comers ready to lead the charge to better search.

My friend you do not know people.

As long as people find out which celebrity was in what movie or what restaurants are nearby, they wont care if it’s google or Bing that tells them.

Bing has a roughly 8% desktop market share. PC has a 70% market share.

That means about 11.5% of windows computer didn’t switch away from Bing.

Assume a similar share on apple devices. Apple has two billion active devices.

Assume that is 1.5 billion people, round down market share to 10%: 150 million of the richest customers on earth. What is that worth to google?

Not to mention another competitor could buy the spots for less. If google leaves an opening someone would try to compete. Even Apple might.

So there’s future downside risk along with the risk to present profits.

This is the crux of the underlying legal theory that this case is exploring. If the above statement is true, then yes; Google has been just burning money, and "stupid waste" isn't an antitrust issue (though maybe their shareholders could file a lawsuit).

But the DOJ makes the case that Google doesn't see it that way, Apple doesn't see it that way, and users don't see it that way... That if Apple changed the default to Bing tomorrow, users are so under-informed about the way the web works that Microsoft and Google's search share would swing radically and immediately. There's meat on those bones; people (who aren't Extremely Online HN Users, like yours truly) seem to find the search engines interchangeable, which implies the default matters. A lot.

No they wouldn‘t. A lot of testing and (probably?) research has shown that a massive amount of regular normie users will never change any defaults of any kind. Many would probably not even notice what search engine they‘re using. Defaults are incredibly powerful. They would easily accept a marginally worse product.

Especially when the latter makes a huge hullabaloo around user privacy that the former does not support.

I’m doing it rn.

Jokes aside, yeah they should both be in trouble, but if that was the case then Apple wouldn’t be testifying against google.

I like the few times where the government gives companies reasons to fight each other rather than work together.