Google's litigator cringes in court after witness reveals secret data about its deal with Apple

Google’s litigator cringes in court after witness reveals secret data about its deal with Apple،

We have already mentioned several times that the US v. Google antitrust lawsuit revealed some interesting information about Google’s search revenue sharing with Apple and other companies. Even if such agreements have always been mentioned, the testimonies collected during the trial made it possible to draw out more precise details. For example, University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy was on the witness stand today, and the information he testified under oath sparked a reaction from Google’s top litigator, John Schmidtlein .

At the booth, Murphy revealed that Google pays Apple 36% of revenue generated from search advertising through the Safari browser. That this data had never been made public before was clear from Schmidtlein’s reaction when the figure was announced in the courtroom. The lawyer “visibly” cringed when the percentage was mentioned by the witness according to Bloomberg.

Google Search is the default search engine on the iPhone - Google's lawyer grits his teeth in court after a witness reveals secret data about its deal with Apple

Google Search is the default search engine on iPhone

Naturally, Google would want to keep this number a secret, not necessarily to prevent the public from knowing this percentage, but to keep it away from other manufacturers like Samsung who might want to renegotiate their own deal with Google if they ever found out how much Apple was receiving. And Google knew it because last week it filed a court filing claiming that revealing more information about its deal with Apple “would unreasonably harm Google’s competitive position relative to its competitors and other counterparties. .

Apple and Google have a revenue-sharing deal that predates the iPhone and dates back to 2002. The deal is considered the most important of Google’s deals with hardware makers because it also calls for Google to be the driving force. default search on iPhone. However, these agreements are used by the Justice Department as evidence to prove that Google is making these payments to prevent other search engines from becoming the default option on tech devices. And that could be considered anti-competitive.

If the DOJ wins its case and proves that Google is anticompetitive in search, it could require that the company be split into different business units.