Part of the purpose of Google’s payments is to make Google the default ‘general search engine’ but part of them is also to stop device-makers experimenting with ideas that unbundle – ‘bleed off’ – things out of general search. That will change now, though of course whether it results in anything is, again, unclear.
Meanwhile, so far I’ve only been discussing Bing as the alternative, but for Apple, uniquely I think, there is also the option to create its own. The capital costs of building and running a search engine are too large for a startup, and for Samsung or Motorola (Lenovo) they’re too far out of scope: perhaps more importantly, as above, if a large sample of search queries is needed, neither of them have enough. One could consider Amazon and Meta here, but only Apple has both the money and the distribution: it can launch as the default on devices driving 30% of US search, giving it several times more query volume than Bing has ever seen.
(Note that Apple has some search activity data already: as per the screenshots above, it sees the queries, and knows which suggestions users choose, but it does not see which results people click once they’re on Google.)
This prompts an amusing dilemma for the DoJ: it is also suing Apple for abusing what it claims is a monopoly of ‘performance smartphones’ (a more challenging market definition than ‘general search engines’, incidentally). Now it wants more competition in search engines, but the most obvious way that such competition could emerge is for Apple to make its own new search engine the default on this ‘monopoly’ platform. (Microsoft of course already makes Bing the default search engine in the default browser on the dominant PC platform, but no-one seems to care.)
Would Apple do
