Google pays Apple 36% of the revenue it earns from searches in Safari

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....

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...

You could innovate and make a better product and it doesn't matter because you can't outbid Google.

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.

You can make your substantive points without that, so if you'd please do so instead, we'd be grateful.

Do they help against fingerprinting?

That's tautological

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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 :)

Google without ads is an unprofitable company that constantly makes bad technology bets and cancels projects more often than they release anything useful.

I’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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

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.

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.

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.