Cue the confetti: Apple has 20 billion reasons to celebrate Google

You’ve gotta love these court cases against major tech companies if only for the discovery and testimony that come out because of them.

Turns out Eddy Cue still works at Apple. A few years of not seeing a guy dance onstage at a keynote can make you forget.

“Eddy Cue reveals the three reasons Apple won’t build a search engine”

Of course, Apple’s not going to build a search engine! We wouldn’t build one if you gave us $20 billion! Which, uh, is what Google gives us every year to not build a search engine.

Cue’s comments come as the result of the U.S. Department of Justice’s suit against Google which accuses the company of holding a monopoly in online search, something it says Apple aids and abetts through the afore-joked deal. The court believes that, without the deal, Apple might develop its own search engine. Possibly called “Ping”. Can neither confirm nor deny.

Cue has three reasons why it wouldn’t, which the Macalope will summarize for you:

1. Apple is a busy company! It has no time to develop a search business! It’s too busy rolling around in piles of cash!
2. Search seems like a lousy business to get into right now what with the AI and such.
3. Advertising is only a hobby for Apple, not a “core business”! Also we hate advertising because it inevitably leads to privacy violations. We’d prefer to just do a little advertising and let others do the big-time privacy violatin’.

None of these seem super convincing. Naturally, Apple would just rather have the $20 billion. That seems obvious. So, yeah, the company doesn’t want to make a search engine. Would you rather go find a job digging ditches or win the lottery? Seems like if you won the lottery you could get the satisfaction of digging a few ditches on your own time.

The AI argument isn’t a terrible one, but the company certainly could build a search engine if it wanted to, if only by acquiring an existing one to build on which — surprise! — it was looking into just a few years ago. It’s worth pointing out that Apple didn’t have mapping capabilities, either, and it managed to create one, albeit not without some pains along the way. Is Maps a “core business”? Hardly. For that matter, is TV? Or weather? Apple bought Dark Sky. Internet search certainly seems just as core to iOS as weather does, even if the former comes with the ickiness of advertising.

Meanwhile, in the DOJ’s suit against Apple, the government contends that Apple’s deal with Google puts the lie to the company’s assertions that it cares about its customers’ privacy. How could Apple care about privacy, the argument goes, if it uses Google — which does not care at all about privacy — as the default search engine?

Quod! Erat! Demonstrandum!

It’s not an argument devoid of any logic but, while Apple certainly isn’t a victim here — “No. Please. Stop throwing money at us. Oh, my, this is truly a horrible turn of events.” — Google is literally the name that is synonymous with online search. Apple could use Bing or DuckDuckGo as the default, but most consumers, for better or worse, expect Google and would likely say “What the heck is this nonsense?” if Apple set the default to anything but.

But to Cue’s point, if Apple made its own search engine, it would be doing the privacy-violating instead of Google. If search must include advertising, then it is probably better to not do it yourself. Like, if U.S. foreign policy has to involve murder, the Macalope’s not moving out of the country, but he’s also not running out to join a CIA hit squad.

He doesn’t know what you’ve heard.

The horny one supposes it’s probably naive to suggest a search engine not be run with ads and maybe just delivers the best results possible without 3-10 things at the top someone paid to put there.

Yeah, that’s probably naive, when there’s all that money to be made.

The obvious answer is to simply not have a default at all; just pop up a dialog box asking people to pick their favorite search engine on setup. But Google doesn’t like that answer because iOS is such a big part of its search business and Apple doesn’t like that answer because it wouldn’t get that sweet $20 billion. Plus, most people would probably just pick Google out of habit anyway, even though it’s increasingly just not a good user experience.

It seems Cue doth protest too much. All the way to the bank.