As the New York Times writes in an extensive article, the deal between Google and Apple is being targeted by the competition watchdogs.
Google pays Apple between 8 and 12 billion US dollars to be the default search engine on Apple devices. If after reading this article you feel like changing this setting on iOS, you can easily do so in Settings > Safari > Search Engine.
Google pays so much money to Apple because Google is an advertising provider. And the more people use Google, the more Google earns. So if Apple gets about 10 billion dollars you can assume that Google earns a multiple of your search queries.
Half of all Google search queries come from Apple devices
The US Department of Justice is now critical of this deal. Currently, about 92% of all search queries made worldwide run via Google and this represents a monopoly that is not well received. Since the deal with Apple will further strengthen the monopoly and competitors will be kept from a better market position, Google will probably have to justify itself for this approach. For Google, the deal with Apple is particularly lucrative: about half of all search queries come from Apple devices. So the search engine giant has an extremely high risk if this search engine default setting is no longer allowed for Google.
Apple doesn’t care about privacy when searching
And Apple? Well Apple keeps telling us how much attention is paid to our data – but they set up a search engine that monitors just about everything we do on the net. No wonder, as the billions mentioned above represent over 15% of Apple’s profit. Thus, the claim to privacy and the simultaneous pre-setting of a data killer seems to be a contradiction. It is, but marketing creates a different image.
Using another search engine is easy
If you don’t want to be fooled by two global corporations, just change your search engine to DuckDuckGo or Ecosia. That usually works out quite well, and for those few occasions where you can’t find the right one, you can always fall back on Google. It’s just a matter of preventing Apple’s default total surveillance. There is also the possibility to use another browser, for iOS you can use the DuckDuckGo app or Brave for example.
