Christian Carlos. Peninsula 360 Press. [P360]
The U.S. Department of Justice has Apple and Google in its sights. The lucrative deal between these two big companies represents one of the largest antitrust cases ever handled by the U.S. government, reports The New York Times.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Google, alleging that the company - based in Mountain View - used practices that do not encourage market competition and that, on the contrary, in the search and advertising markets it used to maintain an illegal monopoly.
In 2017, Apple renewed its agreement with Google's search engine so that Apple devices, in their "Spotlight" function, Safari - the default browser - and Siri - virtual assistant - would have Google's search engine as their default over Yahoo's, Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo's.
The New York Times reports that Apple receives between 8 and 12 billion dollars a year for this deal with Google. To date, it is believed that this could be the largest payment Google makes to a third party company; this deal favors Apple with an impressive 14 and 21 percent of Apple's annual profits.
The technology community has been bold enough to point out that this sum has become the main source of Apple's product development year after year. The exhibition is on the innovative proprietary architecture chip - ARM - the A14 Bionic, the heart of the new iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPad Air from 2020. This should not be taken lightly, as it is the first processor for mobile devices that would surpass the 3Ghz mark, representing a performance of more than 33% compared to its previous chip, the A13.
Apple does not store user data. However, according to the Department of Justice, nearly half of the searches Google receives are from Apple devices. For Google, losing this deal would mean a hard blow to the company, so much so, that it would enter a crisis.
The business is profitable for Google, since its business model is based on AdSense -the Google ad system-.
Apple does not have much room for manoeuvre either, since Google is the number one search engine on the Internet. This situation generates a monopoly on the part of Google and not Apple, since as mentioned, it is possible to migrate, with an update, the default options of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS -the latter two through Siri-.
The Justice Department complaint cites a comment by a senior Apple employee in 2018: "Our vision is that we work as one company.
While the consequences may impact Apple, they represent a catastrophic danger for Google, since Google would have no alternative to an ecosystem larger than that of the company led by Tim Cook. The New York Times speculates what the technology community already rumored: that Apple would absorb some search company, or, as it did with Apple Maps, create its own search engine which, in turn, would pose a greater threat to Google, since Apple would be becoming independent of Google.
