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.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple when pitching default search deal appeared first on MacDailyNews.
