The lawsuit of the century reveals a hidden $ 12 billion alliance between Google and Apple

Tram Ho

In a century antitrust lawsuit between the US Department of Justice and Google that showed how much the search giant paid to dominate its iPhone search engines and abuse its position: from 8 billion USD to 12 billion – accounting for 15% to 20% of Apple’s global revenue.

This is a huge amount of money that Apple gets for Google to have one of the most beautiful positions in the world in the field of online search: the default search engine on iPhones and other Apple devices.

Vụ kiện thế kỷ tiết lộ liên minh ngầm trị giá đến 12 tỷ USD giữa Google và Apple - Ảnh 1.

Apple, which doesn’t have its own search engine, signed a multi-year agreement to make Google the default search engine on iPhones and other Apple products, investigators at the Justice Department said. This also means that Google will be present by default in the Safari browser, the Siri audio assistant and Spotlight device search.

According to the US Department of Justice’s indictment, the deal is so important to Google that the possibility of losing the deal would be listed as “Red Code” (critical) in Google – but Google said, they never heard the term until it was read in the Justice Department’s complaint.

The high value of this contract means that before the deal was signed, Apple CEO Tim Cook had a private meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018 to discuss how to cooperate with the two giants. Silicon Valley giants could ” drive search revenue growth .”

Then an Apple employee wrote to a partner at Google, “Our vision is to work together as a company .”

Vụ kiện thế kỷ tiết lộ liên minh ngầm trị giá đến 12 tỷ USD giữa Google và Apple - Ảnh 2.

More than just an economic partnership between big businesses, John Newman, a former Justice Department antitrust attorney, now a professor of law at the University of Miami said: ” This is not collusion. classic copper, with two rivals shaking hands to raise prices and each benefiting. It’s like a monopolist agreeing with another company to split the rent more exclusively . ”

Justice Department attorneys also view the Google-Apple alliance as something other than a mere partnership agreement: a striking example of Google being accused of cheating the online search market when Fight any opponent by spending huge amounts of money to get one of the best looking positions in the world looking for.

Opposing the Justice Department’s argument, Google’s Global Vice President Kent Walker said that people can completely change the default search engine on their browser if they want.

Our agreements with Apple and other device manufacturers and other carriers are no different from agreements many other companies have used to distribute software. Other search firms, including including Microsoft’s Bing, also competed with us for the deal. And our agreements have passed many antitrust reviews . ”

Refer to NPR

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Source : Genk