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If I'm reading this correctly, this is about the deals Google had, between December 2019 and March 2021, with Telstra, Optus and TPG (apparently Australia's thr
by svat 1y ago
If I'm reading this correctly, this is about the deals Google had, between December 2019 and March 2021, with Telstra, Optus and TPG (apparently Australia's three largest telecommunications companies), to be the default (and only) pre-installed search engine on Android phones sold by those companies, and those companies would in return be paid by Google some fraction of its search-ads revenues.
Some things I'm curious about, and would be helpful context:
- Why did they stop in 2021, and is it normal for these things to take 4+ years to resolution?
- Does Google have similar deals in other countries, e.g. in the US does it have similar deals with T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T? If yes are they are similarly anticompetitive, and if not why not?
- Similar question about the agreements Google has with Mozilla and Apple, to be the default search engine on their browsers.
- Roughly how much would this deal have been worth to Google? I imagine it's not very likely the providers would have chosen a different default search engine, though without this deal they'd likely have more options pre-configured so users would have had more choice (and this I imagine is the primary anti-competitiveness complaint in the first place).
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoGoogle has had these deals in many other countries with both carriers and manufacturers. In many cases, that agreement has already been found completely illegal (possibly why they stopped here). The deal is the Android MADA and you can find examples of it going back over a decade.
- guyomes 1y ago> Does Google have similar deals in other countries Wikipedia has pages on antitrust cases against Google in the world [0] and specifically in U.S. [1,2] and in European Union [3]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google_by_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
- svat 1y agoThanks, I was asking specifically about deals with telecom companies to be the default search engine, and your second link [1] seems to be relevant, in that it mentions Verizon, though the deal with Apple seems to have been the core of the case: > Much of the trial centered on Google's deal with Apple to have Google search as the default option on the Safari web browser. Witnesses from Google, Verizon and Samsung testified about the impact of Google's annual payments of approximately $10 billion to maintain default status for Google search.