The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google may be paying Apple as much as $13 billion per year to be the default search engine for the Safari web browser which is included on all Apple devices. That’s up from $1 billion that Google paid Apple in 2014 which was disclosed in a court filing during a legal battle with Oracle. These agreements make it virtually impossible for competitors to ever make a dent into Google’s 92.1% US search engine market share. The WSJ article notes that even if Google was precluded from default search deals many people would still choose to use Google for search, validating Google’s argument. Source: Google BlogGoogle says that its free products help people and small businesses across America.

Source: Wall Street Journal September 27, 2020 02:20 UTC