> What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.
Wrong question. How about “how can we make our product/service better”? Not, let’s just push the other company over.
Wrong question. How about “how can we make our product/service better”? Not, let’s just push the other company over.
If Apple made them default because they’re the best, then that’s fine. But spending a ton of money to keep themselves as the default, when they already have the vast majority of market power, seems like an artificial barrier to competition.
Unless another search engine is so much better that Apple is willing to forfeit billions of dollars of pure profit, then nobody else has a chance to be the default.
The point is that there is no world in which any other company can outpay Google, regardless of whether or not they are better at search.
Another search engine that is 90% there and can offer only 10% of payments might have been good enough (at least in a certain time frame) if it gave Apple an opportunity to snub Google.
You could definitely say it was anti-competitive if Google was paying more than they earned from this search traffic. But I seriously doubt they are doing that.