(News) "Cooperative" conspiracy: Google would have paid Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine on its devices

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The scheme would have been devised in the early 2000s in secret meetings between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt.

A new lawsuit, filed on December 27 in California (USA), reveals that Google would have paid billions of dollars to Apple for the company led by Tim Cook not to enter the search engine market and give it preference as the default search engine on your devices, thereby violating antitrust laws.

The lawsuit, filed by California Crane School, names Google as defendants; Alphabet, Inc., the conglomerate to which Google belongs; XXVI Holdings, Inc., also part of Alphabet; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and Alphabet.
According to the text of the document, Google and Apple would have agreed, "for mutual benefit", that the latter would not participate in the search engine business in exchange for a percentage of the profits obtained by Google and additional payments of "billions of Dollars". Although the exact figure is not specified in the text, the plaintiff estimates that Google would have paid more than 50,000 million dollars.

For its part, Apple would have let Google be the only search engine included by default on all its devices so that it could collect the money necessary for the agreed payments.

The lawsuit details that the deal was negotiated during secret, private meetings between CEOs, notably Steve Jobs, a former CEO of Apple, and Eric Schmidt, a former CEO and chairman of Google, who in the early 2000s they devised the scheme, currently supported by Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai. "Apple and Google invented the word 'cooperative' to describe their illegal association and conspiracy," the plaintiff states.

Anti-competitive advantage
"Apple and Google agreed to suppress, eradicate and exclude other search providers, both existing and potential, and advertisers who did not favor Google," the document reads. According to the plaintiff, the settlement gave Google a "substantial and anti-competitive advantage" over other search engines, such as Yahoo !, DuckDuckGo and Bing.

The plaintiff explains that due to a conspiracy between two tech giants, it paid Google more money to serve its ads on the search engine compared to the amount it would have paid in a competitive market in the US "Google charges advertisers higher prices than they would otherwise be without the agreement between Google and Apple, "the lawsuit alleges.

"The agreement between Apple and Google removes the ability of Google's competitors to reach a scale of importance that would allow them to compete against Google," he concludes.

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