Re: Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet

On 10/28/20 2:30 PM, Leroy N. Soetoro wrote:
> In a landmark antitrust complaint, the Justice Department is targeting a
> secretive partnership that is worth billions of dollars to both companies.
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-search-
> antitrust.html
> 
> OAKLAND, Calif. — When Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the chief executives of
> Apple and Google, were photographed eating dinner together in 2017 at an
> upscale Vietnamese restaurant called Tamarine, the picture set off a
> tabloid-worthy frenzy about the relationship between the two most powerful
> companies in Silicon Valley.
> 
> As the two men sipped red wine at a window table inside the restaurant in
> Palo Alto, their companies were in tense negotiations to renew one of the
> most lucrative business deals in history: an agreement to feature Google’s
> search engine as the preselected choice on Apple’s iPhone and other
> devices. The updated deal was worth billions of dollars to both companies
> and cemented their status at the top of the tech industry’s pecking order.
> 
> Now, the partnership is in jeopardy. Last Tuesday, the Justice Department
> filed a landmark lawsuit against Google — the U.S. government’s biggest
> antitrust case in two decades — and homed in on the alliance as a prime
> example of what prosecutors say are the company’s illegal tactics to
> protect its monopoly and choke off competition in web search.
> 
> The scrutiny of the pact, which was first inked 15 years ago and has
> rarely been discussed by either company, has highlighted the special
> relationship between Silicon Valley’s two most valuable companies — an
> unlikely union of rivals that regulators say is unfairly preventing
> smaller companies from flourishing.
> 
> “We have this sort of strange term in Silicon Valley: co-opetition,” said
> Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel from 2009 to 2017. “You have brutal
> competition, but at the same time, you have necessary cooperation.”
> 
> Apple and Google are joined at the hip even though Mr. Cook has said
> internet advertising, Google’s bread and butter, engages in “surveillance”
> of consumers and even though Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, once promised
> “thermonuclear war” on his Silicon Valley neighbor when he learned it was
> working on a rival to the iPhone.
> 
> Apple and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, worth more than $3 trillion
> combined, do compete on plenty of fronts, like smartphones, digital maps
> and laptops. But they also know how to make nice when it suits their
> interests. And few deals have been nicer to both sides of the table than
> the iPhone search deal.
> 
> Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices,
> according to the Justice Department, and the prospect of losing the Apple
> deal has been described as a “code red” scenario inside the company. When
> iPhone users search on Google, they see the search ads that drive Google’s
> business. They can also find their way to other Google products, like
> YouTube.
> 
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> A former Google executive, who asked not to be identified because he was
> not permitted to talk about the deal, said the prospect of losing Apple’s
> traffic was “terrifying” to the company.
> 
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing
> Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues
> that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92
> percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online
> lives.
> 
> Online businesses like Yelp and Expedia, as well as companies ranging from
> noodle shops to news organizations, often complain that Google’s search
> domination enables it to charge advertising fees when people simply look
> up their names, as well as to steer consumers toward its own products,
> like Google Maps. Microsoft, which had its own antitrust battle two
> decades ago, has told British regulators that if it were the default
> option on iPhones and iPads, it would make more advertising money for
> every search on its rival search engine, Bing.
> 
> What’s more, competitors like DuckDuckGo, a small search engine that sells
> itself as a privacy-focused alternative to Google, could never match
> Google’s tab with Apple.
> 
> Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual
> payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building
> Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single
> biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21
> percent of Apple’s annual profits. That’s not money Apple would be eager
> to walk away from.
> 
> In fact, Mr. Cook and Mr. Pichai met again in 2018 to discuss how they
> could increase revenue from search. After the meeting, a senior Apple
> employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as
> if we are one company,” according to the Justice Department’s complaint.
> 
> A forced breakup could mean the loss of easy money to Apple. But it would
> be a more significant threat to Google, which would have no obvious way to
> replace the lost traffic. It could also push Apple to acquire or build its
> own search engine. Within Google, people believe that Apple is one of the
> few companies in the world that could offer a formidable alternative,
> according to one former executive. Google has also worried that without
> the agreement, Apple could make it more difficult for iPhone users to get
> to the Google search engine.
> 
> A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the partnership, while a
> Google spokesman pointed to a blog post in which the company defended the
> relationship.
> 
> Even though its bill with Apple keeps going up, Google has said again and
> again that it dominates internet search because consumers prefer it, not
> because it is buying customers. The company argues that the Justice
> Department is painting an incomplete picture; its partnership with Apple,
> it says, is no different than Coca-Cola paying a supermarket for prominent
> shelf space.
> 
> Other search engines like Microsoft’s Bing also have revenue-sharing
> agreements with Apple to appear as secondary search options on iPhones,
> Google says in its defense. It adds that Apple allows people to change
> their default search engine from Google — though few probably do because
> people typically don’t tinker with such settings and many prefer Google
> anyway.
> 
> Apple has rarely, if ever, publicly acknowledged its deal with Google, and
> according to Bernstein Research, has mentioned its so-called licensing
> revenue in an earnings call for the first time this year.
> 
> According to a former senior executive who spoke on the condition of
> anonymity because of confidentiality contracts, Apple’s leaders have made
> the same calculation about Google as much of the general public: The
> utility of its search engine is worth the cost of its invasive practices.
> 
> “Their search engine is the best,” Mr. Cook said when asked by Axios in
> late 2018 why he partnered with a company he also implicitly criticized.
> He added that Apple had also created ways to blunt Google’s collection of
> data, such as a private-browsing mode on Apple’s internet browser.
> 
> The deal is not limited to searches in Apple’s Safari browser; it extends
> to virtually all searches done on Apple devices, including with Apple’s
> virtual assistant, Siri, and on Google’s iPhone app and Chrome browser.
> 
> The relationship between the companies has swung from friendly to
> contentious to today’s “co-opetition.” In the early years of Google, the
> company’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, saw Mr. Jobs as a
> mentor, and they would take long walks with him to discuss the future of
> technology.
> 
> In 2005, Apple and Google inked what at the time seemed like a modest
> deal: Google would be the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser
> on Mac computers.
> 
> Quickly, Mr. Cook, then still a deputy to Mr. Jobs, saw the arrangement’s
> lucrative potential, according to another former senior Apple executive
> who asked not to be named. Google’s payments were pure profit, and all
> Apple had to do was feature a search engine its users already wanted.
> 
> Apple expanded the deal for its big upcoming product: the iPhone. When Mr.
> Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he invited Eric Schmidt, Google’s then
> chief executive, to join him onstage for the first of Apple’s many famous
> iPhone events.
> 
> “If we just sort of merged the two companies, we could just call them
> AppleGoo,” joked Mr. Schmidt, who was also on Apple’s board of directors.
> With Google search on the iPhone, he added, “you can actually merge
> without merging.”
> 
> Then the relationship soured. Google had quietly been developing a
> competitor to the iPhone: smartphone software called Android that any
> phone maker could use. Mr. Jobs was furious. In 2010, Apple sued a phone
> maker that used Android. “I’m going to destroy Android,” Mr. Jobs told his
> biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need
> to.”
> 
> A year later, Apple introduced Siri. Instead of Google underpinning the
> virtual assistant, it was Microsoft’s Bing.
> 
> Yet the companies’ partnership on iPhones continued — too lucrative for
> either side to blow it up. Apple had arranged the deal to require periodic
> renegotiations, according to a former senior executive, and each time, it
> extracted more money from Google.
> 
> “You have to be able to maintain those relationships and not burn a
> bridge,” said Mr. Sewell, Apple’s former general counsel, who declined to
> discuss specifics of the deal. “At the same time, when you’re negotiating
> on behalf of your company and you’re trying to get the best deal, then,
> you know, the gloves come off.”
> 
> Around 2017, the deal was up for renewal. Google was facing a squeeze,
> with clicks on its mobile ads not growing fast enough. Apple was not
> satisfied with Bing’s performance for Siri. And Mr. Cook had just
> announced that Apple aimed to double its services revenue to $50 billion
> by 2020, an ambitious goal that would be possible only with Google’s
> payments.
> 
> By the fall of 2017, Apple announced that Google was now helping Siri
> answer questions, and Google disclosed that its payments for search
> traffic had jumped. The company offered an anodyne explanation to part of
> the reason it was suddenly paying some unnamed company hundreds of
> millions of dollars more: “changes in partner agreements.”
> 
> Correction: Oct. 25, 2020
> An earlier version of this article misstated a term for cooperation
> between competitors. It is co-opetition, not co-optation.
> 
> Daisuke Wakabayashi covers technology from San Francisco. He covers Google
> and other companies. Previously, he spent eight years at The Wall Street
> Journal first as a foreign correspondent in Japan and then covering
> technology in San Francisco. @daiwaka
> 
> Jack Nicas covers technology from San Francisco. Before joining The Times,
> he spent seven years at The Wall Street Journal covering technology,
> aviation and national news. @jacknicas • Facebook
> 
> 
FACEBOOK'S Zuckerberg was in bed with the Biden's CORRUPTION....  I 
wonder if the all powerful Zuckerberg will be sitting prison soon?





-- 
That's karma

*I figured out how Biden and Obama can get some people to their rallies* 
to hear their speeches.

They need to go to a BIG DEMOCRAT RUN CITY and go downtown to a good 
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and burn and riot while they listen to Marxist speeches that promise 
them FREE STUFF....