Google-Apple Relationship at Core of Landmark Antitrust Trial

Google’s antitrust trial begins this week, with the company’s ties to Apple at the center.

While the two tech titans are typically thought of as rivals, a report Monday (Sept. 11) by Bloomberg News notes that it’s a collaboration between Google and Apple that could be “potentially damning.”

In 2005, Apple and Google agreed to make Google Apple’s default search engine, giving Apple up to half of the ad revenue Google earned from searches made on Apple’s Safari browser. As Apple’s mobile devices took off, so did Google’s fortunes in the search world, where regulators say it now has 90% of the market.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and a number of states sued Google in 2020, alleging the company has illegally maintained monopolies in markets for “general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising.”

The DOJ says Apple was “chief among Google’s distribution partners,” and crucial to its case due to an “information-services agreement” between the companies.

Last week, a trio of Apple’s top executives lost their bid to avoid testifying at the trial, after arguing that forcing them to testify again would be excessively cumbersome and duplicate previous questioning.

Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker has called the case “backwards-looking,” arguing that new innovations such as artificial intelligence breakthroughs have opened the door to more competition and search options.

“People don’t use Google because they have to — they use it because they want to,” Walker said. “It’s easy to switch your default search engine — we’re long past the era of dial-up internet and CD-ROMs.”

Google is also facing a separate antitrust suit from the DOJ, which claimed earlier this year that the company had illegally seized control of the online ad industry.

“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the department said in the suit.

The suit, mounted by the DOJ and eight U.S. states, asks a judge to order the divestiture of “at minimum,” the Google Ad Manager suite, including Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX.

Google responded to the suit by saying the government was “doubling down on a flawed” argument that would hurt small businesses and increase advertising fees.

“Today’s lawsuit from the DOJ attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector,” a company spokesperson said in a statement issued to PYMNTS. “It largely duplicates an unfounded lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General, much of which was recently dismissed by a federal court.”