Google is allegedly paying Apple not to launch its own search engine

It seems that there is a secret agreement between Apple and Google, illegal for the antitrust, aimed at avoiding competition between the two companies in the sectors in which they are leaders

The CMA, the Authority that we could define as the English Anti-Trust, is investigating Google and Apple after discovering that there may be a secret agreement between the two companies aimed at avoiding competition.

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Specifically, it seems that Google is paying Apple to prevent the Cupertino company from launching its search engine which, of course, would replace Google’s.

We already know that Google pays Apple approximately $15 billion a year for being the default search engine on Safari, but according to the latest findings, Google would also pay for every search that is made through the Chrome browser for iOS!

Within your browser, it would be natural to imagine that Google can set its search engine as default, without having to account to anyone, but it is not.

It seems that Apple already has its search engine ready, which is actually used when we write something in Spotlight. This engine is also able to search the web and Apple in all these years could have launched the service making it accessible through a web page, competing with Google, exactly as Microsoft does with Bing.

To avoid this, Google would not only pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari but would pay the company a fee for every additional search that iPhone users make, even if they use Chrome on iOS.

Basically, the concept behind all this is very simple to understand: If Apple had its own search engine, it would make a certain income from every single search, so if Google doesn’t want Apple to launch this service, it has to pay for every search that a user performs from the iPhone, even those that come from other browsers, because even there (potentially) the user could have set the Apple engine by replacing it with Google. In a nutshell: both facts and intentions pay off!

Of course, all this is illegal under antitrust laws but it is allowing Google and Apple to maintain dominance in the different fields in which they are respective leaders. We’ll see how the investigation goes.