Government lacks competition
Standard search engine everywhere: Google pays billions
October 27, 2023, 11:26 p.m
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Google is omnipresent in the web browsers of many smartphones and is usually the default search engine. And the tech giant is paying a lot for this. So far there are only estimates of the total. A manager is now revealing the secret.
Google paid over $26 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers. It is the first time that a concrete figure has been announced; so far there have only been estimates. A Google manager named the amount of 26.3 billion dollars (currently around 25 billion euros) in a competition process in Washington, as the financial service Bloomberg reported from the courtroom. It is the group’s largest single expense item.
The industry assumes that much of the money will go to Apple to secure Google’s position as the default search engine in the Safari web browser on iPhones and Mac computers. The case involves lawsuits brought by the US government and dozens of states against Google. This is about the accusation that the Internet company is unfairly hindering competitors. Google denies the allegations. From the government’s perspective, the agreements with browser developers harm competition.
At the start of the proceedings, Google’s lawyer John Schmidtlein countered that it was easy to change the default search engine in browsers. But users accessed Google, because they are satisfied with the quality of the search results. This also happens on Windows computers on which Microsoft’s Bing search engine is preset as the default.