Google spent $26.3 billion in a year to be your search engine. Apple earned billions

It has never been a secret that the American giant pays browser manufacturers in exchange for setting Google as its default search engine. At one time, a very famous case was the long-term cooperation with Mozilla, under which Google was the default search engine in Firefox. Now we found out how big the amounts are.

$26.3 billion in a year. They pay a lot of money for us to use Google

During the ongoing antitrust trial against Google, it turned out that in 2021 alone, the Internet giant from California spent as much as $26.3 billion to place its search engine as the default search engine in other manufacturers’ browsers.

The US Department of Justice, which sued Google, stated in its complaint that the company pays billions of dollars every year, among others. Apple, LG, Motorola, Samsung, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon operators and browser developers, including: Mozilla, Opera and UCWeb –

It is not clear what part of the above-mentioned $26.3 billion goes to individual companies, but the lion’s share of this amount – according to unofficial reports – goes to Apple, which is, paradoxically, one of Google’s main competitors.

As part of the deal, Google is the default search engine in the iPhone maker’s Safari browser. up to even annually.

However, this cooperation is extremely profitable for Google. The data presented at the hearing shows that in 2021, the Google search engine alone brought the company $146 billion in revenue. For comparison, in 2014, Google’s revenues from the same title amounted to “only” USD 47 billion, and the company spent USD 7.1 billion on being the default browser. It is also worth mentioning that Google probably earns a lot from being the default search engine in Chrome, the web browser from Google itself, and it does not have to pay for such “cooperation”.

The Department of Justice emphasizes that spending billions of dollars in exchange for the status of the default search engine is a manifestation of Google’s monopolistic practices. The ministry wants to introduce a ban on this type of cooperation between Google and other companies.

However, the Silicon Valley giant sees nothing wrong with these contracts. As the company explains, every user can change the default search engine at any time with just a few clicks. Google even provides a guide on how to change the default search engine in Chrome in five steps.