'Apple would have very little incentive to take on Google in either search market and it would thus maintain the duopoly in search on both platforms,' Polden explained. In an email, Donald Polden, Dean Emeritus and professor of law at California's Santa Clara University, agreed with the CMA's assertion that the revenue sharing arrangements 'dampen incentives for competition between browsers on iOS.' 'The division of the market is per se illegal under the antitrust laws,' said Alioto.Īpple and Google are currently trying to have the case dismissed citing lack of evidence of a horizontal agreement between the two companies, and other supposed deficiencies. He said Google's deal with Apple, which began at $1 billion per year, reached as high as $15 billion annually in 2021. Alioto, who filed the private antitrust lawsuit, told The Register it would not surprise him to learn that Google has been paying Apple for search revenue derived from Chrome. These alleged revenue sharing arrangements – which are known in detail only to a limited number of people and have yet to be fully disclosed – have been noted by the UK CMA as well as the US Justice Department, which along with eleven US States, filed an antitrust complaint against Google on October 20, 2020. Google paid billions of dollars to Apple and agreed to share its profits with Apple to eliminate the threat and fear of Apple as a competitor 'Google paid billions of dollars to Apple and agreed to share its profits with Apple to eliminate the threat and fear of Apple as a competitor.' 'Because more than half of Google’s search business was conducted through Apple devices, Apple was a major potential threat to Google, and that threat was designated by Google as 'Code Red,'' the complaint contends. The complaint, filed by the Alioto Law Firm in San Francisco, claims Apple has been paid for the profits it would have made if it had competed with Google, without the cost and challenge of doing so. One attempt to explain the arrangement can be found in an antitrust lawsuit filed on December 27, 2021, and subsequently amended on March 29, 2022. Apple does not provide any obvious value to people seeking to use Google Search within Google Chrome. Having Google pay Apple 'a significant share of revenue from Google Search traffic' passing through its own Chrome browser on iOS is difficult to explain. These revenue sharing arrangements therefore dampen incentives for competition between browsers on iOS. Given this revenue share, when or Safari is successful in competing for an iOS user, rather than winning a full share of the search traffic revenue it only wins a partial share (ie the revenue to which it was not previously entitled).

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