How Google’s search dominance has made life difficult for smaller search engines

The time is never right for a tech company to be in the dock for an antitrust trial, but this is an especially vulnerable stage for Google.

The time is never right for a tech company to be in the dock for an antitrust trial. But now may be an especially vulnerable time for Google, given the stiff competition it is facing in the AI and cloud business.

But the antitrust trial that started in Washington on 12 September is definitive for its crown jewel: the search business. The lawsuit is seminal for antitrust cases of the future and in many ways, the future of the internet. Federal prosecutors with the U.S. Justice Department have alleged that Alphabet abused its dominance to deter rivals from entering the search engine market.

The early days of the lawsuit went over the steep deals that Google made with Apple and Samsung to remain as the default search engine. An estimate from financial analyst Bernstein have estimated that Google could be paying Apple between $18 billion and $20 billion a year under this deal.

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It is evident that the Apple contract was a potent one. According to Statista, in 2022, there were more than 120 million iPhone users in the U.S., which accounts for nearly 49% of all smartphone users.

In his testimony earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said about the Apple contract: “They basically king-make.” (Remember Internet Explorer?)

The CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, noted in his testimony that switching just Apple’s private-browsing default to their engine would have pushed DuckDuckGo’s market share “multiple times over.”