Google’s $20 billion per year search deal with Apple was ruled last summer to violate antitrust law. Though Apple isn’t a defendant in the case, its outcome could have a big impact on the company. As a result, Apple has just asked for a stay on proceedings.
New filing shows Apple’s desire to get involved with proceedings
Earlier this week, Apple was denied a motion to present witnesses at the upcoming Google trial.
Apple itself is not accused of wrongdoing in the case, but back when it first made the motion, the company explained: “Google can no longer adequately represent Apple’s interests: Google must now defend against a broad effort to break up its business units.”
In other words, even though Apple isn’t formally involved in the case, it knows that Google has to focus on its own defense interests, so Apple wants the chance to represent itself.
Since its motion was just denied, Apple has followed up with another option: requesting a stay on proceedings to “protect its rights pending appeal.”
Absent a stay, Apple will suffer irreparable harm: the deprivation of its right to participate as a party in the remedial phase of this case moving forward, including possibly at the trial itself, while its undisputed property rights are adjudicated. These harms are magnified by a position Plaintiffs revealed in a recent meet-and-confer with Apple.
Top comment by Blurft
Apple's Q4 2024 "Consolidated Statements of Operations" reported $96.169B in services revenue for the twelve months ending September 28, 2024. If the estimates of $20B a year for this Google deal are correct, then that means Apple's other services bring in ~$76B per year.
Apple does not break down how much revenue or profits each individual service generates, so we have no idea how much is coming from licensing deals, Music+, TV+, Fitness+, iCloud+, the App Store, etc.
At the same time, Apple is very aggressively fighting against any efforts to open up iOS to competing app stores, while claiming that they actually have no idea how much money it makes - clearly ridiculous. I think they're well aware that it's a huge source of profit, and they're fighting against losing that too.
I'm sure I'll receive a lot of flak for this, but I think the uncomfortable truth is that a very significant portion of Apple's services revenue is due to rent-seeking - leveraging their ownership over a massively popular platform to grow their own wealth without creating new wealth. It doesn't cost them anything meaningful to make Google the default search engine, but they ask $20B for it. It doesn't cost them 15-30% of App Store transactions to run the App Store, but they demand it anyway.
I think Apple is afraid of investors and consumers learning how much of their revenue is really just exploiting their market power, rather than actually creating value.
The full document cites that courts “have commonly granted stays pending appeal of orders denying intervention,” and thus Apple believes this court should do the same.
If Apple isn’t able to participate as desired, it has another ask instead:
In the alternative, the Court should at minimum afford Apple full access to the record as a nonparty until the D.C. Circuit rules.
One way or another, Apple believes its participation in court proceedings—to some degree or another—will be necessary to avoid having to “suffer irreparable harm.”
Do you think Apple should be able to participate in Google’s case? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.
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