- Google said in a newly unsealed filing that in 2018 Microsoft proposed selling its Bing search engine to Apple or starting a Bing joint venture.
- According to the filing, Apple’s Eddy Cue said Microsoft has problems with search quality and is not investing as much as Google.
Google said in a court filing earlier this month that Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018. The documents are from Google’s antitrust lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice, which was unsealed on Friday.
The legal battle over whether Alphabet has a monopoly on Web search advertising touches on important agreements Google made with Apple and Android phone makers to ensure exclusivity for its search engine. Google spent more than $26 billion in 2021 to keep its search engine the default, according to slides shown during the October trial. Google has tried to prove that it is competing fairly.
In a filing earlier this month, Google said Microsoft pitched to Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 to make Bing the default for Apple’s Safari web browser. Apple claimed that the answer was no, citing quality issues with Bing.
“In each case, Apple critically considered the relative quality of Bing and Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for Safari users. That’s competition,” Google wrote in its filing. There is.
In its own newly compiled filing, the Justice Department said Microsoft spent nearly $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009 after search efforts under its MSN and Windows Live brands.
According to StatCounter, Bing currently has a 3% global market share. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft earned $3.2 billion from search and news ads, while Google search and other revenue totaled $48 billion.
Google said in its filing that when Microsoft approached Apple in 2018 to emphasize improvements to Bing’s quality, Microsoft proposed selling Bing to Apple or forming a Bing-related joint venture with Apple. He said he did.
“Microsoft’s search quality, its investment in search, all of that didn’t matter at all,” Eddie Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, said in the filing. “So everything was low. So the quality of search itself wasn’t that good. They weren’t investing in anything comparable to the level that Google or Microsoft could invest in. They also weren’t investing in advertising organizations or monetization. The method wasn’t very good either.” ”
Google said Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to Apple executives regarding Bing’s evaluation, but his comments were redacted in the filing.
Representatives for Google and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.
In October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a court hearing that “each year during my tenure as CEO, my focus has been on determining whether Apple is willing to enter into a default agreement with Bing.” He testified.
“If Apple had not received the huge payments it sought from Google, Apple would have developed its own search engine,” the Justice Department said in a filing.
Bloomberg reported in September, citing unnamed individuals, that Microsoft executives had “exploratory” talks with Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddie Cue, around 2020 about selling Bing to Apple.
clock: Loop’s Rob Sanderson says it’s unclear whether Google can maintain its dominance in technology.
