Because being the web’s de-facto home page lets Google track everything you do without restrictions.
In 2022,Google paid Apple $20 billion to be the default Safari search engine.
And then where would Google be, ousted from the iPhone?
Defaults are powerful things.Firmbee.com / Unsplash
“Apple currently has the most popular smartphone in the world.
Popular Problems
Bit by bit, Google has become the way most of us start the internet.
We don’t pop in Google.com into our browsers.
Most of us just use the default search engine on our phones.Solen Feyissa / Unsplash
We just punch in the search term or the name of the website we want to visit.
Most people I see using browsers treat the URL bar as if it were Google.
They don’t even bang out URLs anymore.
Google isn’t even the best search engine any more.Dawit / Unsplash
They just Google them, and choose the first result.
This is excellent for Google, right up until it isn’t.
By being so deeply integrated into the web app, it gets to see everything we do.
Solen Feyissa / Unsplash
But the advantage of being “built-in” is also the greatest danger.
And that’s what’s worth paying $20 billion a year for.
Various Positions
For Apple, the deal is clearly a good one.
It’s money for nothing.
So that’s almost a quarter of Apple’s yearly services revenue coming from Google’s web app payment.
said iOS and macOS software developerSteve Troughton-Smith on Mastodon.
The DMA threatens all of this.
It has also forced Google to give Chrome users achoice of search engines.
And so far it’s working.
On iOS, third-party browsers areseeing a growth in the number of users.
This is a serious business for both Apple and Google.
Without those defaults, Google loses a lot of what makes it so powerful.
Even for Apple, that’s a chunk of change.
