Apple’s billion-dollar advertising deal with Google apparently goes well beyond the Safari browser and search content for the Siri services. This is reported by the British IT portal The Register, citing informed circles. Apple is therefore not only involved in the advertising revenue generated by Safari and Siri, but also in revenue flowing through the iOS version of Chrome. This would be extremely unusual as it is a completely independent app from Apple. Neither Google nor Apple commented on the report to The Register. The British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has been checking the search deal for possible violations of competition law for a long time, also refused to comment.
It’s about a lot of money – and competition
The contract with Google has been keeping Apple’s tills ringing in the important service division for years. There, sales of 20.77 billion US dollars were generated across all segments in the Christmas quarter. According to analyzes from 2021, Google should pay at least 15 billion dollars a year. In return, the company gets the right to be the default search in Safari and Siri.
But the deal goes beyond that, according to The Register. In a market survey by the CMA, Chrome for iOS is not mentioned directly, but the name of an area in which there is an agreement between Apple and Google has been blacked out. “Apple receives a significant share of revenue from Google search traffic on Safari and × on iOS devices,” it says. While “×” could possibly stand for Siri or Spotlight search, according to The Register, it would be odd for one existing Apple product to be unredacted but another not. However, it would be news (worthy of censorship) that Chrome for iOS would also bring revenue to Apple.
No return from Apple?
Apple is an important contractual partner for Google, and it is said that half of the sales from searches come from the iPhone manufacturer’s devices. However, being involved in Chrome for iOS revenue would be rather odd since there is no direct return. The competition authorities could take action accordingly, should this actually be the case.
In a law firm unfair competition lawsuit pending against Apple in California separate from the other investigations, it saysGoogle paid Apple “billions of dollars and [Apple] shares in profits in order to eliminate the danger (…) of competition from Apple”. In fact, Apple is said to have planned in the meantime to enter the search business itself. For Google, this was apparently a “Code Red” internally, something that the search engine only the greatest competitive threats – such as currently ChatGPT.
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