Google reportedly spent up to $ 12 billion to be the...

Smartphones are a prime target for advertisers. Each year, they brew billions of dollars. It is therefore necessary to be present prominently on its devices. And Google has paid out considerable sums.

If you launch the Safari web browser on your iPhone or iPad and search the address bar, there’s a very, very high chance that it is Google which is displayed by default. Obviously, you could have configured the feature differently, but for the majority of users, Google is the default search engine. And it turns out the Mountain View giant paid Apple billions of dollars to make it so.

Google reportedly paid Apple up to $ 12 billion

We’ve heard before that Google paid Apple to remain the default search engine on Apple-branded devices, but today we know how much the search giant has paid to do so. At least that’s the figure that emerges from the lawsuit against Google by the US Department of Justice for suspected antitrust violation. Court documents revealed that Google paid between $ 8 billion and $ 12 billion.

to be the default search engine on iOS devices

Google is currently the target of legal action brought by the Department of Justice over charges of anti-competitive practices and this payment to Apple would be a perfect example. According to University of Miami law professor John Newman, a former Department of Justice antitrust lawyer, “this is not a classic collusion where two rivals agree to raise prices and both benefit. It is much more like a monopoly agreement with another company to share the revenues of that monopoly. ”

The search engine DuckDuckGo claims that as a result of this practice by Google, only about 2% of searches arrive on its platform. The CEO of the company is convinced that if users had had the opportunity to identify DuckDuckGo as their preferred search engine, that figure would have jumped to 20%.