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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal).

Not sure if that is true-competition laws often prohibit the dominant market player from doing certain things, yet still allow smaller players to do the same thing.

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I assume OP meant in terms of money. Apple will not accept scraps (like tens of Millions) for the default search engine, after getting billions from Google. And no-one else will have the financial resources or be willing to burn these amounts (Microsoft) to offer similar numbers.

They don't need to offer similar numbers? If this ruling prohibits Google, the dominant search engine, from buying their Safari defaults, then Apple has a choice of:

- Zero dollars

- More than zero dollars from a smaller search competitor (Bing? New AI player?)

I suspect Apple will want more than nothing. They also have quarterly financials to report.

Apple's biggest disincentive to continue the practice is that they themselves end up in the monopoly crosshairs from time-to-time, and it doesn't look good in terms of the DOJ targeting them if they continue a practice that was ruled monopolistic with another company. It isn't necessarily monopolistic if they do, but it raises suspicion.

(Personally, I wish monopoly law didn't seem so much like "vibes". It's really hard to answer whether the rule is fair when the same actions have different legal consequences depending on some vaguely-defined categories like "market sector").

Apple creating their own search engine will likely raise more eyebrows than letting an existing Google competitor buy their way into the iPhone ecosystem. In fact the DOJ may prefer a smaller player turn into a bigger competitor to Google, even if that's Microsoft's Bing.

As others have pointed out, these types of deals haven't been ruled illegal, they only apply to Google for abusing its monopoly.

Apple will want more than zero dollars.

Millions might as well be zero to Apple. There is overhead when it comes to dealing with another company, combined with the potential of damaging your brand. If the number is not in the billions I doubt they would bother. The only companies capable of paying the amounts that would make it worthwhile would be excluded from this option.

This is true if:

- A new deal with another company is actually in the millions. There are a lot of numbers between zero > 20B that's currently being paid for that default setting.

- Said deal remains small and doesn't grow over time, even as a new competitor to GOOG starts eating away at their market share and spreads around search ad revenue.

> They also have quarterly financials to report.

one of the biggest brands in the world, with how many billions in CASH .. needs the money.. This is the same nonsense that WSJ peddles everyday.. "greed is good" and makes the world go around, details are just in the way.

No, actually.. there are other parts of society that are touched by this, and their children btw.. Apple and Google and whomever are now bumping against the edges of Big Society. There is no predicting what will come out of the woodwork on this IMHO

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