For years, Google watched with growing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its former partner and sometimes competitor would end up building its own search engine.
Those fears grew in 2021, when Google paid Apple about $18 billion to keep Google’s search engine as the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. . The same year, Apple’s iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users more comprehensive web results, like those they might have found on Google.
Google quietly planned to put the brakes on Apple’s search ambitions. The company sought ways to undermine Spotlight by producing its own iPhone version and persuade more iPhone users to use Google’s Chrome web browser instead of Apple’s Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. . At the same time, Google studied how to free Apple’s control over the iPhone by taking advantage of a new European law aimed at helping small businesses compete with Big tech.
Google’s anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company’s complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer devices and software that has been a key partner in Google’s mobile advertising business for more than a decade.
The relationship has come under scrutiny in the landmark antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by the Justice Department and dozens of states. Government lawyers have argued that Google manipulated the market in its favor with predetermined agreements signed with companies such as Apple, Samsung and Mozilla. These pacts funnel traffic to Google’s search engine when users search for information in the top bar of a browser.
Google is expected to begin a three-week presentation of its defense in the month-long trial on Thursday. The company has so far downplayed the role its predetermined deals with phone makers and browser companies have played in its success. It maintains that its search engine is popular due to its quality and innovation, and that users can easily choose another default in their device settings.
But documents seen by The Times showed that Google understood the power of defaults to funnel users to a product while trying to change Apple’s selection of Safari as the iPhone’s default web browser.
“Competition in the technology industry is fierce and we compete against Apple on many fronts,” said Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesman. “There are more ways to search for information than ever before, so our engineers make thousands of improvements a year to Search to ensure we deliver the most useful results.”
Although Google is banking on default settings because they are important, he added, users can and do change their defaults. Apple declined to comment.
Last fall, Google executives met to discuss how to reduce the company’s dependence on Apple’s Safari browser and how best to use a new law in Europe to undermine the iPhone maker, documents show. While Google considered several options, including how much data it should have access to on the iPhone, it’s unclear what executives decided.
At the time, the European Union was preparing the Digital Markets Act, which was designed to help smaller companies break Big tech‘s control of the industry. Google, already one of the largest Internet companies in the world, saw an opportunity.
Under the law, the European Union is forcing big tech companies designated as “gatekeepers” to open their platforms to competitors by March, giving users the ability to choose which service to use, and to stop favoring their own services in their platforms.
The law is expected to force Apple to allow European Union customers to download rival app stores. Users setting up a new Apple device in Europe may also be presented with the option to select a default browser other than Safari.
Google, which will be forced by law to allow greater competition in search, explored ways to pressure EU regulators to open up Apple’s tightly controlled software ecosystem so Google could steer users away from Safari and Spotlight, they showed. documents. Executives debated how aggressive the company should be in advocating for access to Apple’s operating system.
Google executives estimated that if users had to choose, the number of European iPhone users who selected Chrome could triple, according to documents reviewed by The Times. That would mean the company could keep more search advertising revenue and pay less to Apple.
Regulations intended to help smaller companies enter the market “can also very often be used by incumbents to gain an advantage over their rivals,” Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the US Carey Law School, said in an article. University of Pennsylvania, specialized in technology and competition. interview.
Google and Apple have had a partnership with the Safari search engine since 2002, half a decade before the debut of the iPhone. The relationship became more complicated when Google launched the Android mobile operating system in 2008, a direct competitor to the iPhone.
Google has been concerned about Apple’s Spotlight since the feature’s early days. In 2014, an internal presentation discussed the impact Apple’s new operating system, iOS 8, could have on Google’s revenue. The second page of the slideshow was titled “Bottom line: It’s bad,” according to a presentation presented as evidence in the antitrust trial.
“We hope these suggestions will divert queries from Google in verticals where Spotlight is activated,” the company wrote.
Apple poached a powerful Google search executive, John Giannandrea, in 2018, and expanded its teams of search employees while building a more capable Spotlight system. The 2021 improvements to the tool, as part of iOS 15, raised concerns at Google about Apple’s intentions in the search market, said a person with knowledge of the discussions.
In response, Google made an effort to create its own version of Spotlight, which was intended to work on iPhones, the documents show. It presented users with brief data and information from files, messages, and applications on the device.
In recent years, Apple hasn’t used Spotlight to support Google’s so-called commercial queries (which include ads in their results), so the tool hasn’t hurt Google’s search business.
Still, Google executives last year contemplated ways to convince the European Union to designate Spotlight as a search engine, according to the documents. Spotlight contained at least five different search functions that offered web images; “rich” responses and results that provided additional information such as photographs; and universal search, which could scan devices, apps and the web. The European Union has not yet decided whether to open Spotlight to greater competition under the law.
Google’s reliance on laws intended to help small businesses has frustrated some legal experts.
“I prefer that companies compete on the merits so that consumers want to use their products by offering higher quality products,” Hurwitz said. “Not paying lawyers to go to the European Union and establish rules to gain access to your competitors’ platforms.”
Adam Satariano contributed reporting from London.
