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Google is currently in a battle with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) about default search slots. We have mentioned this in the newsletter before but here's a brief reminder of what's at stake. Basically, Google pays Apple over $10 billion a year to make Google search the default on Safari. So when you type in a word on your iPhone browser it automatically uses Google search.
The DoJ is saying that this is anticompetitive behaviour and wants to squash the arrangement. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who owns search engine Bing, claims that Google gets more traffic because Apple users are forced to use Google. Of course that's ridiculous, users want to use Google because they are the best at search.
Ben Evans has an interesting take on this fight. He suggests that if the DoJ win the case, Google will actually benefit because they will save all those billions of dollars and users will carry on using Google search anyway. Apple will then lose out on those payments, and will probably launch their own search engine. Like many anti-competitive cases, it sounds like rubbish.
