Google $26B placement

I previously mentionned about how Google prevented DuckDuckGo from being the default and how they paid Billions to Apple every year to be default on iPhone. But the current anti-trust trial brings to light exactly how much.

The Verge tells us Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere:

Just to put that $26.3 billion in context: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced in its recent earnings report that Google Search ad business brought in about $44 billion over the last three months and about $165 billion in the last year. Its entire ad business — which also includes YouTube ads — made a bit under $90 billion in profit. This is all back-of-the-napkin math, but essentially, Google is giving up about 16 percent of its search revenue and about 29 percent of its profit to those distribution deals.

Apple share is $18 billions of these 26.3. Mozilla gets some of this, but in comparison it is very little and the quesiton is whether Goolge does this to keep Mozilla alive, for pure altruism, or it is really worth the marketshare. My cynicism wants it to be the first one: if Mozilla ran out of money, Firefox might disappear and Google Chrome become the de-facto monopoly in browser. A bit like the 1997 150M$ investement in Apple by Microsoft with the commitment to ship Office 98, a key piece of software whose unavailability on Mac would jeopardize its future. Had Microsoft not have helped their flailing competitor, would they have been a biggest target of the DOJ anti-trust investigation? And the existence of Chrome is solely to serve search as the trial reveals.

All in all, a business that rely on ad placement to make money is itself an ad placement.

Every piece of software will evolve beyond its intended purpose to sell you something.