Court documents revealed by an antitrust investigation against Google showed that Google paid Apple $20B to be the default search engine on iPhones, iPads, and Macs in 2022. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella claimed that this agreement between Apple and Google has made it impossible for their own search engine Bing to compete with Google.
iPhone, iPad, and Mac users can change their default search engine to a Google competitor. However, people often leave default settings as they are because they are afraid to change their phone settings, or they just don’t know how. This is likely why Google would pay such a copious some of money just to be the default — they know it has an impact. That way, most users won’t even see competing browsers.
