One executive revealed the number, and it’s more than the GDP of Haiti.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Google’s antitrust trial revealed the multi-billion dollar tech company paid out a whopping total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to keep its status as the default search engine on phones and multiple browsers, Bloomberg Law reported Friday.
The Justice Department argued that by spending an exorbitant amount of money to retain its default status, Google is ensuring the market isn’t competitive with other search engines.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president and search head, revealed the gigantic numbers during his testimony, according to Bloomberg Law.
He claimed Amazon is one of two of Google’s most formidable competitors and said the company stayed ahead of it and other search engines by relentlessly increasing its research and development.
Raghavan claimed Google remains a top search engine because of its quality and ease of use, saying users can switch to Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo if they choose.
“Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won’t change them,” DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta during a hearing in Washington, CNBC reported.
Saved 54% of original text.
For anyone who doesn’t click the link, Google paid $26.3 billion.
Yet, in a redacted copy of an internal email chain released on Friday, Jim Kolotouros, the vice president of Android Platform Partnerships, wrote: “Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
So Chrome’s whole point is bringing users to Google Search… and Google Search’s whole point is Google Ads. I’m Glad I use Firefox.
Cut the snake by the head.
Problem solved.
In the last update of firefox google was redefaulted as search engine. Wonder if such roll out costs extra?
Was it anything else before?
And what does that make Android’s whole point? 😉
5.25 billion smartphone users, so they are paying about $5 per user. If you switch the default from Google, you are taking $5 from them!
TBH, 26.3 billion dollars are just a drop in the bucket for Google. That bucket of course filled with the money they got with industrial scale spying, cross-site tracking, denial of control, forced ads, destruction of competition, among countless dirty tricks they play on regular netizens.
They made a $40b profit last year. More than half their profits is a “drop in the bucket”?!
Imagine if they put a fraction of that money into…I donno…actually making their search algorithmically competitive.
Who needs competition when you’re a monopoly on the whole internet lmao.
Right? My takeaway from this is that it was cheaper for them to do this than it was to make a good search engine.
The report, shared with The Register, estimates that Google’s payout accounts for 14% to 16% of Apple’s annual operating profits [in 2021].
What?!? That’s huge
