Google pays Apple 20 billion a year for iPhones to use its search engine

Since the arrival of iPhone On the market, this phone has a browser, and the ability to search for content on the web. You do this using the search engine. Googlewhich a few days ago celebrated 25 years of service.

Apple has investigated, according to several reports, the possibility of creating its own search engine (or jumping to another as the default tool) but the interest in achieving something like this, when Google has more than 90% of the marketIt is low.

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And it is reduced even more when you take into account that Google pays to be the official search engine for the iPhone. It’s a business for both: Apple makes money for including a feature that it should still offer, and receives what is recognized as the market leader; Google makes sure to be the search engine of choice on the second mobile platform (the first, of course, being Android, which it owns).

In fact, the CEO of the alternative search engine DuckDuckGo testified at the end of September that his agreement to be Apple’s official search engine, which he negotiated between 2016 and 2018, and was scrapped in 2019, had not prospered because this company did not want to lose money. provided by Google, which also pays other manufacturers to be its default search engine, as reported by Reuters a few days ago.

How much money does Google invest in being the search engine for the more than 2 billion iPhones that have been sold throughout history? The exact amount has never been disclosed, but a Wall Street Journal investigation estimated the amount between $8 billion and $12 billion a year in 2020; Forbes estimated that it would be about $15 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in Safari.

Now, The Register reports that Today they are between 18 and 20 billion dollars a yearaccording to the documents provided by Google in the monopoly lawsuit initiated by the United States Department of Justice last September, and which were analyzed by a specialized financial consulting firm.

This agreement (the Information Services Agreement, as the company calls it), which It represents between 14 and 16 percent of Apple’s annual profits, It could be annulled by the US Justice Department (like others that it maintains with Samsung or Mozilla) because it is considered anti-competitive.

If it happens, it will be in one or two years at least; Experts also estimate that it could change in the US (where Apple could put a box so that users can choose which search engine to use), but continue to remain the same in other countries. And there is always the possibility (in a few years) that Apple will have its own search engine.

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Source: Elcomercio

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