Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that Apple receives a whopping 36% of Alphabet’s search revenue for Safari.
The tech boss was testifying in a lawsuit filed against the company by ‘Fortnite’ creator Epic Games when he was asked to clarify the validity of the figure by an opposing attorney.
He simply replied: “That’s correct.”
The sensitive information was revealed when expert eye witness testifying for Google in a separate antitrust trial against the US Department of Justice, University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy, allegedly revealed the figure by accident.
According to Bloomberg, Google’s main trial attorney John Scmidtlein “visibly cringed” once Kevin revealed the figure.
Prosecutors from the US Department of Justice are seeking tough penalties on companies like Google for their alleged anticompetitive practices.
At the beginning of the antitrust trial on Tuesday, lawyers for Apple and Google both asked Judge James Donato to keep figures confidential, though he refused.
He said: “It doesn’t seem to be sinking in.
“This is a courtroom in the United States — we do business in bright light and open doors.”
“Just coming in and saying, ‘We’re kind of sensitive about this,’ isn’t going to fly.”
It was later confirmed in Google’s trial against Epic Games that confirmed the tech giant paid more than $26 billion to other companies, including Apple, Mozilla and Samsung, for their services to be installed as the default search engine on their competitor’s devices.
The attorney for Epic asked Sundar how much Google pays to Apple, to which he said it was over $10 billion. The attorney was not happy with the answer, however, and pushed for an exact figure, to which the tech businessman conceded Google actually pays $18 billion to ensure the California-based company continues to use Google as Safaris’ default search engine.
