Alarm bells rang at Google in April. They learned that Samsung was considering changing the search engine on mobile phones to Bing. This means a loss of approximately 3,000 million in annual revenue and the loss of a significant battle for the search engine that dominates this market with an iron fist. Eventually, Samsung backed down, but the soap opera didn’t end there.

It could have been Bing but it wasn’t. Samsung wanted to take advantage of the new Bing Chat options with this change, but ultimately backed down and kept everything as is. Or almost, because the South Korean company wanted to make the lives of its users a little easier.

Change search engine. As The Wall Street Journal points out, Samsung has tried to make it easier for users to change the default search engine if they’re using Samsung’s own web browser; Many users cannot benefit from this. Although this option did not have much impact, Google reacted immediately when it learned about it.

not possible. Google avoided this option by taking advantage of the terms of its contract. If Samsung had made this change, it would have violated this and would have forced the company to pay a large fine to Google. This could have triggered a legal battle at a time when the relationship between both companies was considerable.

leaked secrets. These details would not normally come to light, but they did so due to the significant criminal investigation Google is facing in a US antitrust case. There they accuse the giant of taking advantage of its privileged position to position the search engine as the native engine on mainstream smartphones.

Apple and Google, more of the same. The same details also allowed us to reveal the relationship between Apple and Google in this field. In 2007, Apple asked Google to show default search engine options, and Google responded, “If we are not the default search engine, we will not share revenue.”

Win win. Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of services, testified at the hearing Tuesday that Apple chose Google as its default search engine because it is the best product on the market. What he didn’t mention was that Google was paying him about $15 billion a year to make its search engine the default option on iOS.

A domain name in danger. Google has a 90% market share in online searches, allowing it to know the browsing habits of billions of people. This is the basis of the advertising business that raised $162 billion in 2022, and the investigation will jeopardize that privileged position.

Image | Arkan Perdana

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