Investors Score the US-v.-Google Remedies Ruling a Win for Google and Apple

Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

“There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote.

Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and Apple since it allowed an existing arrangement to continue in which Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to be the default search provider on the Safari browser.

I’m picking nits here, but I think part of the ruling is that Google can no longer pay to be the default search engine. And, in my opinion, they never needed to, and never should have put that into their contracts for these deals. They’re just paying Apple (and Mozilla, and Samsung, and others) for the actual search traffic that goes to Google from those companies’ browsers. It’s up to Apple whether Google is the default Safari search engine (which it is, and will continue to be). It just won’t be in the terms of the deal that Google search has to be the default.

The ruling paves the way for the two companies to partner further on AI-related services on Apple devices, analysts said. Apple currently has a deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into various iPhone services. Apple and Google have had talks about striking a similar deal for Google’s AI system called Gemini.

I wonder if this antitrust ruling was the holdup on Apple announcing Gemini as an Apple Intelligence partner? Apple, famously, almost never talks about future plans, but at last year’s WWDC, Craig Federighi made conspicuous mention of Google Gemini as a potential Apple Intelligence partner — and now here we are 14 months later and it hasn’t yet happened.

Also, re: this decision being largely a win for Google — it just never made sense to me that Chrome even is a sellable asset.

★ Thursday, 4 September 2025