What will Apple & Co Do Now That Google Search Was Declared Illegal?
Google is a monopolist.
What will the others do about it? Apple, Microsoft & co
The American DOJ will likely first target Google's practice of paying third parties to be the default search engine on their devices. If that happens, Google will save $20b and Apple will lose $20b, and then what?
Will Apple choose Microsoft Bing as the default? Unlikely.
Eddie Cue, from Apple stated:
āI donāt believe thereās a price in the world that Microsoft could offer usā [to make us switch].
In the end, Apple wants the best for their users and no other search engine does a better job than Google. In any case, $20b exceeds Microsoft's annual revenue from Bing, so even if Apple were open to negotiations, it would be mad for Microsoft to pay that amount.
Will other startups build a Google competitor? Also unlikely.
Indexing and analysing the entire web is an expensive business.
Apple estimated that creating a Google clone would cost them at least $6 billion a year. Even the most well-funded VC startup couldn't afford such an investment.
Another factor is that Google is obviously the default search engine on Chrome, which holds over 64% of the global browser market share.
This raises the question: why would Google even need to pay to be the default search engine on other browsers or devices?
The answer is in this screenshot.
On iPhones, users can perform searches outside of a browser, and currently, the first results are reserved for Google (via the default browser, Mozilla in my case). However, just below those results, there are direct links to publishers' websites.
I know what youāre thinking š but no, theyāre not ads! yetā¦
In essence, Google wants to prevent Apple or Samsung from experimenting with similar solutions, as these could potentially bypass it altogether.
My best bet is that if Apple stops receiving payments from Google, they would soon push direct links more prominently. And they could make money from them too.
However, ads isn't Apple's core business. Apple Search Ads is still an underdeveloped product, and their sales organisation is small. This could open a new market for other companies to manage ads for Apple or Samsung. In fact, this is already partially happening, with startups offering "expansion" features for Apple Search Ads. But, Apple would still be the āgatekeeperā.
To make things more complicated, Ai chatbots are entering the search game too.
It seems ChatGPT will be integrated natively into iPhones. So, will Apple need to offer a choice screen also here? Will Google, with Gemini on Android?
No matter how you approach the issue, a new monopolist will emerge.
By the way, Apple was also recently sued for monopolising the smartphone market.
It seems we're just shifting from one monopolist to another.
