Apple and Google Walk Into a Courtroom Together

The thing about the Google-Apple search deal — the one where Google pays Apple somewhere north of $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on every iPhone, every Safari tab, every Siri fallback — is that it was always going to end up here, in a federal remedies proceeding, with a judge deciding whether two of the richest companies in human history are allowed to keep doing business with each other.

The DOJ's proposed fix, after winning the monopoly case, was blunt: end the deal. No more payments. No more defaults. Force Apple to actually shop around for a search partner, or build something, or just let the market sort it out — whatever that means when one side of the market has indexed the entire internet.

So Apple and Google issued a joint statement opposing the remedy.

Which is, yes, exactly the correct move.

Not because the deal is obviously fine — a $20 billion annual payment to lock out competitors is the kind of arrangement that tends to attract the word "monopoly" — but because the proposed cure is stranger than the disease. Breaking up the payment doesn't break up Google's search dominance. Google is the default because it's good, or at least because it has been good for long enough that switching costs have compounded into something that looks like permanence. Bing exists. DuckDuckGo exists. Nobody is using them because Apple stopped taking Google's money.

The DOJ's theory requires you to believe that Apple, freed from the corrupting influence of twenty billion dollars a year, would build or license a meaningfully better search experience — and that this better search experience would then erode Google's market share in a way that, apparently, twenty years of competition has failed to accomplish.

That's a lot of believing.

Apple's position is not complicated: they take the money because their users actually want Google search, and they have no particular interest in spending years building a search index to make a regulator feel good about the competitive landscape. This is not a principled stance so much as it is a true one.

The joint statement is mostly a legal document dressed up in PR language, which is what joint statements are. But the act of filing it — the two companies standing next to each other in front of a judge — matters more than the content. It says: we are not the problem you think we are, and we are willing to make that argument together, which we can do because we are each separately worth more than the GDP of most countries.

Whether the judge agrees is a different question.

But Apple signing onto this is the right call. The alternative — quietly accepting the remedy, watching Google's payments disappear, and then spending the next decade either running a worse search experience or cutting a deal with Microsoft — is worse for Apple users in ways that have nothing to do with competition law and everything to do with the fact that Bing is still Bing.