Google defends its Safari deal with Apple in antitrust ruling appeal

In a filing made today appealing the antitrust ruling against its search business, Google argues that its long-running deal with Apple reflects lawful competition, not anticompetitive exclusion. Here are the details.

A bit of context

In August 2024, the Department of Justice won its antitrust case against Google, with the court finding that the company had illegally maintained monopolies in general search and search advertising.

From Judge Amit Mehta’s conclusion:

After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

The case then moved to the remedies phase, where the court considered what restrictions should be imposed on Google’s search business, now that it had been found to be a monopoly.

One of the most closely watched questions throughout the proceedings was what would happen to Apple’s search agreement with Google.

The terms of the deal became clearer during the case: Apple set Google as the default search engine in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, in exchange for 36% of the search advertising revenue generated through Safari.

In practice, as court documents revealed, Google paid Apple around $20 billion in 2022 alone.

When the remedies phase concluded, Judge Mehta allowed Google to keep paying Apple for default placement in Safari, but imposed new limits on those agreements.

Under the new terms, Google can no longer make the Safari agreement exclusive or prevent Apple from promoting rival search engines (or generative AI products). Perhaps more importantly, he also imposed a 12-month default limit.

As a result, Google can’t condition revenue sharing on keeping any Google service as the default for more than 1 year, which, in practice, means Google’s competitors will get a yearly shot at offering Apple a better deal.

That brings us to today.

Google appeals decision

In a filing made today with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (via Reuters), Google asks the court to reverse the antitrust ruling against its search business in its entirety.

In broad terms, the company argues that the district court made several legal errors, including by treating its browser agreements with Apple as exclusionary, defining the relevant search markets too narrowly (antitrust cases live or die by the definition of the market), and imposing remedies that force Google to share search data and results with rivals.

In the document, Google references its deal with Apple as the result of lawful competition on the merits, rather than an anticompetitive exclusive agreement:

As the district court found, the browser-makers chose Google because they “value its quality, and they continue to select Google as the default because its search engine provides the best bet for monetizing queries.” Apple described choosing Google as a “no brainer” because it was “a sure thing. They have the best search engine, they know how to advertise, and they’re monetizing really well.” Bing, by contrast, was “horrible at monetizing advertising.”

Google also argues that while the court treated its deal with Apple as exclusive, the agreement simply made Google the default search engine in Safari. Rival search engines, the company notes, remain available through Safari’s settings.

The company also attempts to argue that the decision to design Safari around a single default search engine was Apple’s, unrelated to its deal with Google.

Further trying to prove its point, Google points to Apple SVP of Services and Health Eddy Cue’s testimony about Microsoft’s attempts to replace Google as Safari’s default search engine:

Even though Microsoft offered to pay Apple 100% of search advertising revenues generated if Bing was made the default, Apple believed that it would still earn less because users would abandon the Bing default in favor of Google. Given users’ strong preference for Google, there was “‘no price that Microsoft could ever offer [Apple]’” to make Bing the default that would be more profitable for Apple.

Google also notes that Cue’s testimony included his argument that “we have to pick what’s best for our customers, and today, that is still Google.”

You can read Google’s full appeal document here.

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