Eddy Cue, the senior vice president (SVP) of services at Apple, says that the company will not create a search engine. He adds that competing with Google will cost billions (of dollars) and years to develop. The statements from Cue were recorded in a motion to intervene in the United States Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case against Google.
Apple receives around $20 billion from Google every year to be the default search engine on Mac, iPhone, iPad and all other Apple devices. To ensure the deal is not harmed, the iPhone maker filed a motion to intervene in the ongoing antitrust case.
The search giant Google and the DOJ continue to disagree on the approach to addressing the search engine monopoly. However, both have agreed to negotiate or cut Google’s search engine deal with Apple.
Apple SVP Services Eddy Cue says “economically risky” to compete with Google Search
“If this Court prohibits Google from sharing revenue for search distribution, Apple would have two unacceptable choices. It could still let users in the United States choose Google as a search engine for Safari, but Apple could not receive any share of the resulting revenue, so Google would obtain valuable access to Apple’s users at no cost,” said Cue. “Or Apple could remove Google Search as a choice on Safari. But because customers prefer Google, removing it as an option would harm both Apple and its customers.”
Google proposed a three-year ban on the search engine deal with Apple, instead of a ten-year ban suggested by the DOJ. The search engine giant agrees with the DOJ that the deal with Apple should be revoked.
Additionally, Google also proposed to diversify the default search engine option on Apple devices, such as by keeping Google as default search engine on the iPhone but the iPad could have a different default search engine (such as Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.)
