2y ago

Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

arstechnica.com

Technology @beehaw.org

salarua @sopuli.xyz

2y ago

Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-accidentally-blurts-out-that-apple-gets-36-cut-of-safari-deal/

Technology @beehaw.org

Gil (he/they) @beehaw.org

2y ago

Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-accidentally-blurts-out-that-apple-gets-36-cut-of-safari-deal/

50 comments

So, Google is clearly paying lots of money directly to maintain their lead in the search engine market.
Bad look for Apple as well. They say they take privacy seriously, but are selling their user's data to Google, one of the last companies you would want getting your information if you were concerned about privacy.
- Selling their user data to Google? They're putting Google as the default search engine, but users are free to change it. I don't understand how that's the same. People would probably set it to Google anyway these days, which is a shame because Kagi is the best search engine.
  
  Apple does make a big deal about having sensible and secure defaults. This is the issue
  
  because Kagi is the best search engine
  Fucking lol.
  
  I like Kagi, a lot, I've used it since I first heard about it months ago. But I worry how willing people will be to pay for search. I hope it continues to improve long term because it's a great service. I don't plan to use anything else.
  
  They sell not data, but users, like a youtuber of mil. subscribers sells their userbase to Black Surfshark Online. Exclusive, if limited, access, exposure. If Apple happened to pick anything else as a default search engine, the majority wouldn't even mind. And they could've done even worse if they put unique ID to every search queue like Edge, Yandex do.
  
  Fuck Google and fuck Kagi.
  I use DuckDuck Go.
- They say they take privacy seriously, but are selling their user’s data to Google
  Only idiots think Apple is privacy friendly lol.
  I don't link to news sites, but if you look up Apple Let Contractors Listen To Private Voice Recordings you'll see that in 2019 they were sending voice clips to contractors.
  Apple has everyone fooled. They act like they are so privacy focused because they do processing locally on your device instead of in the cloud, which means nothing. Google also has been moving a vast majority of things to local processing on their Pixel devices for years now. Is Google now privacy focused?
  
  Only idiots think Apple is privacy friendly lol.
  Apple has everyone fooled.
  Apple are privacy-focused insofar as they will privately sell your data, sneakily.
  
  Aren't almost all (at least photo editing ones) new Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro features in the cloud? What things do you mean when you say Google is moving to local processing?
- but are selling their user’s data to Google,
  They are?
  
  Yeah, correcting those types of typos on mobile is a pain in the ass, haha.
- IOS is closed source and doesn’t allow side loading, it shouldn’t be considered in privacy discussions
  
  Why not? Isn't apple able to push whatever they want to user's phones without their permission, like they were paid to do with the U2 album?
- It could always be worse. But that's a bad excuse.
  
  The issue with Google is the scale of the data they can collect and their ability to use that data. Between Chrome, Search, Android, Waymo, Google Fi, etc they have a lot of ways to gather and use data on users.
- their users'* data
  
  Nah, there's only one Apple user, she just posts a lot online under pseudonyms and buys a continuous stream of products.
- selling their user's data to Google
  Oh no my gmail address already sold. My mailbox, my searches :'(
Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple's platform. That's incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It's the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.
- I mean, 30% is what Apple charges for regular apps and all in-app purchases/subscriptions too.
  
  It’s also a pretty standard margin for most retail stores as well. 30-40% at that scale isn’t surprising at all.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the DOJ—which has made the Google-Apple deal the center of its case alleging that Google maintains an illegal monopoly over search—this detail confirms how valuable default placements on iPhones are to the search leader.
Previously, sources told The New York Times that Google paid Apple approximately $18 billion in 2021 for the deal, but the exact amount of revenue sharing remained unknown until Monday.
The DOJ's trial also recently revealed that Google paid $26 billion in total for default contracts, which are ostensibly responsible for driving up its search advertising revenue that is right now rapidly climbing.
In total, across all those default deals, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint estimated in a post on X that it's possible that Google derives "at least $90 billion of its current annual revenue."
"We’re continuing to focus on making AI more helpful for everyone; there’s exciting progress and lots more to come,” Pichai said in a statement reported by Search Engine Land.
Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the antitrust trial, has said that the Google-Apple default deal is the "heart" of the DOJ's case against Google.
The original article contains 716 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- This summary literally strips out the most important part 😂
  Google's default search deal with Apple is worth so much to the search giant that Google pays 36 percent of its search advertising revenue from Safari to keep its search engine set as the default in Apple's browser, Bloomberg reported.
  
  deleted

50 comments