Google pays Apple nearly $20 bn a year to be on your iPhone, but this fantastic deal is in danger

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Amid the sensational US Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust case against Google, where the legality of the company's deal with Apple is under contention, through which it has become the default search engine on iPhones, a new report has made a major revelation on just how much is being paid. The antitrust case intends to find whether anti-competition practices were used by Google to keep itself as the default search engine on iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone 14, iPhone 15 and other models. Recently Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified in the case and called it a ‘problematic' behavior of tech companies to strike exclusive deals with platforms to keep competition away.

Bernstein, a firm that advises investors on where to place their bets, has published a report where it has reiterated its earlier estimates on how much Google is paying Apple. “We believe there is a possibility that federal courts rule against Google and force it to terminate its search deal with Apple. We estimate that the ISA is worth $ 18B - 20B in annual payments from Google to Apple, accounting for 14-16 percent of Apple's annual operating profits,” said the report, as quoted by The Register.

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If you have used an iPhone, you have seen the combined search and URL bar where you normally post your search queries and quickly add links. You must have noticed that whenever a search query has been made, it opens Google's results page. This can be changed manually if you particularly prefer Bing or DuckDuckGo, but if not, ‘by default' it stays fixed at Google Search. And people generally do not change the default search engine.

As Nadella said in his testimony, “Defaults are the only thing that matters in terms of changing