Whatever Google pays Apple for its search engine to be the default on iOS, Google must be making billions more
The reason why the talks with Microsoft stalled had much to do with the large amount of money that Apple was receiving and still receives from Google each year. We’ve seen estimates of this payment ranging from $4 billion to as much as $20 billion. The DOJ believes the actual range is $4 billion to $7 billion annually. Apple did not want to lose this cash flow. Considering that Google is not in the business of giving away money, you can imagine how much the company and its parent Alphabet must make from being the default search engine on the iPhone.
The Bing app on iOS 17
Microsoft and its Board discussed how to tell stockholders why a multi-billion dollar hit would be good for the company
As a result, a deal with Apple to replace Google Search with Bing would have resulted in a multi-billion loss for Microsoft. Executives at Microsoft met with the company’s Board to try and figure out how they could explain to stockholders why it was in the company’s best interest to take a hit on such a deal.
Under oath, Tinder told the court, “In the short term, it would have been highly negative. We told the board that we are thinking about making a multi-billion negative investment to support this. It was all around trying to make them confident that we could make the switch.” Two years later, in 2018, Microsoft and Apple discussed using Bing instead of Google on iPhone units outside of the U.S. But once again, nothing came of it. And after another two years had gone by, the aforementioned exploratory talks between the two tech giants about Apple acquiring Bing started and quickly ended.
