According to a recently unsealed post-trial brief from the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, or form a joint venture related to the search engine when making its pitch to Apple to become Safari’s default search engine.
Jessica Kuruthukulangara for Seeking Alpha:
“In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice,” said Google. “That is competition.”
Apple executive Eddy Cue said this was because Bing’s search quality wasn’t as good as Google and Microsoft wasn’t investing at “any level comparable” to Google.
Google also argued that its search engine received nearly 80% of queries on Windows PCs in the U.S. despite Bing being the default option in those devices.
MacDailyNews Take: Google has long held far too much power, especially in the U.S., in search engines. When everyone uses one point of finding out information, the temptation to filter results to deliver whatever narrative or services the controlling company (or their masters) wishes is too strong for most monopolists to resist.
As those who control the App Store chokepoint in CCP-controlled China, among other things, Apple likely knows this, but seems to be hopelessly addicted to the tens of billions Google pays them each year to keep this search monopoly in place.
We hope that someday Apple will collectively grow a pair and do the right thing. Failing that, this is why antitrust law exists: Google’s search engine monopoly combined with its digital ad monopoly is suffocating competition.
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Frankly Google sucks now. It is not relevant when it gives me search results from 10 years ago. Convinced, even with AI, that no one can build a semantic search engine. Its lousy Boolean logic that does not cut it anymore and its what we are all stuck with.
Google was great until not that long ago, maybe 5-6 years. Now most results are from corporate news sources, special interest organizations and other mass media and elite-approved outlets. MDN hasn’t been sympathetic to Musk and X but I find it be the best source for various kinds of news and information you’ll never get from anywhere else. If you know a foreign language you’ll find it’s even less moderated. It’s the global comments section that has been purged from most news sites because they usually contained too much truth and counter-narrative.
Though better on privacy than Google, unfortunately I wouldn’t trust Apple to provide any better or less politically correct, thought controlling search results.
Apple is willing to partner with “Let’s Be Evil” Google because Google pays Apple about $20 billion a year for its monopoly search status on the iPhone. No messy bidding. Just a huge sweetheart deal and it serves both of their communist ideology agendas. Handing stolen elections to Democrat Communists whenever needed, and doing everything possible to smear and destroy any independent thinking person or idea that runs counter to the Democrat Party Communist Narrative. Apple is a happy communist useful idiot company.
Google has no power. Anyone can avoid it.
Google sucks and Microsoft sucks too!