Apple received $18 billion in bribes from Google to set the company’s search engine as the default. If the company does not accept this deal, Google will face dire consequences.

The American antitrust lawsuit against Google is increasingly taking on the appeal of a concrete master class in the abuse of a monopoly position. This case already showed that Google was incentivizing Apple to keep the Google search engine as the default in Safari. This agreement prevented Apple from developing its own alternative or even investing in Bing. Google was apparently afraid that Apple would emerge as a competitor and had the money to prevent this.

The New York Times now reports that Google paid Apple around $18 billion in 2021 to keep its own search engine as the default within Safari on the iPhone. The newspaper knows this from two anonymous sources, because the amount is actually secret.

Anti-Apple plan

Google also discovered that Apple’s Spotlight tool on iPhone returned more results than Google Search itself. The company was looking for ways to undermine Spotlight on iPhone and planned to lure iPhone users to Chrome. Monopolies are only good if you are the monopolist. That’s why Apple has also been exploring how it could use European laws to circumvent Apple’s control over the iPhone.

In other words, Google had a double plan. Ideally, everything would stay the same and Apple would continue to offer Google Search by default on the iPhone. If that didn’t happen and Apple itself wanted to develop a competitor to Spotlight that would then become the standard, Google planned to bring out the big guns and undermine both Spotlight and Safari. The New York Times describes this strategy as an anti-Apple plan.

Google will soon be able to defend itself against the antitrust lawsuit, but what has since come to light is not very subtle. The facts show that Google understands the importance of being set as the standard and was prepared to maintain that position through both financial incentives and a plan of attack if these overtures were rejected. In addition, the negative impact on competition is obvious: Apple has practically failed to develop as a competitor to Google.