Newly emerged court documents have confirmed the crazy amount of money Google pays to Apple in order to secure preferential treatment for its search engine.
As Bloomberg reports, freshly unsealed antitrust court documents have revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 alone to remain the default search engine on Safari.
It’s not news to reveal that Google pays Apple heavily to remain the default search option on Safari. We’ve reported on this numerous times over the years, with various reports and rumours – many stemming from Google’s ongoing antitrust court case – pointing to eyebrow-raising sums.
Until now, the latest and most specific figure to date came about in November, when it emerged that Google paid Apple 36% of any advertising revenue earned from web searches through Apple’s Safari web browser.
These new revelations simply place a stark figure on and arrangement that both companies have gone out of their way to hide. It turns out that since May 2021 Google has been paying Apple more than $1 billion a month for its default search engine status.
We also learn that Google’s payments to Apple represent 17.5% of the latter’s operating income. In other words, it’s an awful lot of money, even by Apple’s cash-rich standards.
The document cites Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, as being behind these revelations, so it’s straight from the horse’s mouth.
The Justice Department and Google are preparing to make their closing arguments in the case this week, and you can expect a decision to come later this year. One suspects that Apple will be praying for Google more than anyone.
