Google Hum To Search
Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue testified on Tuesday in the antitrust suit the US government brought against Google. Cue actually helped Google in his testimony during the case United States versus Google.
At the core of the government’s lawsuit is the allegation that Google paid firms $10 billion to have its search engine placed as the default search engine on mobile devices.
Eddy Cue defended Apple’s decision to make the Google search engine the default on its devices. “There certainly wasn’t a valid alternative we would have gone to at the time,” he reportedly testified. This is called the Information Services Agreement.
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“I always felt like it was in Google’s best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done,” he added.
“We try to get people up and running as fast as possible,” Cue told the court. “Setup is just critical stuff. We make Google the default search engine because we’ve always thought it was the best. We pick the best one and let users easily change it.”
Even Microsoft continues to promote its own search engine, Bing; even though no one uses it. Bing is the default in Windows and Microsoft programs like Office. One would think a company as huge as Apple would have developed its own search engine by now. The fact that it has not says a great deal about the virtual impossibility of competing with Google.
CNBC reported that Google could pay Apple as much as $19 billion this year alone. So, if it were simply a matter of convenience, of choosing the best and most popular search engine, then why would Google need to pay Apple so much money? This is something the federal prosecutors will surely ask.
Eddy Cue’s testimony came after Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of Google rival search engine DuckDuckGo, testified against Google in the case. DuckDuckGo only holds about 2.5% of the American web browser market. In his testimony, Gabriel Weinberg asserted that his firm was unable to convince any company to make its search engine the default in their products because Google had already gotten everywhere first.
