In a report released on Wednesday, UK regulators expressed concerns over a deal between Google and Apple. The deal where Google’s paying is Apple more than a billion pounds every year to remain as a default search engine in Safari browser. Regulators call this can create a significant barrier to the other competitors in the search engine market.
Google Paid Apple About $1.2 Billion in 2019
Tech giants are often blamed for killing a healthy competition. Since they’re induced with cash and large networks, they cool possibly be manipulating things to their favor. This could kill competition, and ultimately affect the end user who pays hefty price but still be exploited. Thus, regulators step in to avoid any manipulative deals that crush a healthy competition. One such deal happening every year is between Google and Apple.
UK’s Competition and Markets Authority in its report filed on Wednesday said the deal between Apple and Google can create a “significant barrier to entry and expansion” to competitors like Verizon’s Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Though these companies to pay Apple every year, it’s just petty to what Google pays, and to remain as options rather than default! This undermines Google’s strong-arm again others.
Apple has a significant share in several markets through its iPhones. And since all these handsets carry Safari as the default browser, Apple is selling its power to other companies like Google to earn more money. The deals are astonishing as, it’s reported that, Apple has received around £1.2 billion (around $1.5 billion) in 2019 alone for its UK market, just to make their search engine default on Safari browser. And the majority contributor to this figure is Google.
This number was around $1 billion in 2014 and has grown ever since. Regulators believe the amount to increasing soon over time, since two-thirds of internet browsing today is done via phones, and is constantly increasing. Thus, more exploitations set to happen if deals of such aren’t stopped. Regulators here are looking for a way to either limit Apple from monetizing such positions or letting users pick their own choice of search engine at the beginning.