I bet it won't happen, and if happen it won't affect G a lot, at this point.
1. Who else can Apple put as default search engine? -- Bing? But Microsoft is Apples direct competitor on laptop and desktop market. Who knows what Bing would show users? And other competitors in search market are extinct. Yahoo, AOL, etc. Duck is using BING's api.
There are local market search engines (like Yandex in russia), but they already are default search engines on mobile in that markets(at least on lot of android devices, don't know about iOS).
At most Apple would offer user to chose search engine on first set-up, and guess what users would chose?
So we slowly are moving to second point.
I don't thing Google needs to pay for this, they just are doing this by inertia. Most competitors are extinct. And people know by word of mouth, that google "is the best search engine".
About Firefox it might be tricky. People who decided to try firefox can be more interested in trying another search engine as well, so here their payment for default SE makes some sense.
Google is also a competitor in mobile which is a much bigger deal. Apple and Microsoft have been competitors and at the same time worked together since Microsoft wrote AppleSoft Basic in 1980. Microsoft was on stage with Jobs at the introduction of the Mac in 1984 and has consistently developed Office for the Mac since 1986 through all of the Macs transitions.
If Google didn’t need to pay, why are they paying $18 Billion a year?
I added the part “are forced to” because as much as I rail against the government getting involved in the free market when it comes to tech, it even makes me feel uneasy that the two major mobile platforms are unabashedly colluding and one is outright paying the other to funnel customers.
I don't think Android is a competitor to iOS. Most iOS users fanatically don't want other mobile OS. Don't think Ads can change this :D
Not sure about PC, but I bet availability of more apps and games can tip the scales. I consider MS more competition than Android. But that's just my perspective.
> it even makes me feel uneasy that the two major mobile platforms are unabashedly colluding and one is outright paying the other to funnel customers.
Indeed sounds creepy.
P.S. As other commenters mentioned -- there is Brave search, about which I was not aware, that it has their own Crawler. Apple could potentially switch to it(or buy it).
I doubt users of ARM based Macs are saying “I really want a laptop with a quarter of the battery life, gets hot enough to melt steel when I open three Chrome windows and sounds like a 747 and on top of that is slower”.
These days as long as consumers have Office, Adobe’s software and a good web browser, they don’t care.
Apple does have its own crawler - AppleBot. It uses its own “search engine” in parts of the interface.
If google stopped paying apple, then apple would probably make their own search engine honestly. They already have a tentacle wrapped around all sorts of industries you wouldn't have expected 15 years ago.
They wouldn't do it like that. They'd pull an App store or an Apple News. Block the world, whitelist publishers that jump through your hoops. Then it would be really easy to make a search engine if you are only crawling the top 100 sites or whatever that 99.999% of apple users are visiting anyhow. Most users would probably blind to the fact that this isn't close to actual search, and many more still wouldn't care. Some might actually like Apple removing the SEO spam that plagues google.
Or they could “pull an Apple podcast” - anyone can register their podcast for free, the actual MP3 are played from your server (unlike Google and Spotify) and there has been a documented API of its index that anyone freely use and that is used by many third party players on both iOS and Android. The API has been available since 2005.
1. Who else can Apple put as default search engine? -- Bing? But Microsoft is Apples direct competitor on laptop and desktop market. Who knows what Bing would show users? And other competitors in search market are extinct. Yahoo, AOL, etc. Duck is using BING's api.
There are local market search engines (like Yandex in russia), but they already are default search engines on mobile in that markets(at least on lot of android devices, don't know about iOS).
At most Apple would offer user to chose search engine on first set-up, and guess what users would chose?
So we slowly are moving to second point.
I don't thing Google needs to pay for this, they just are doing this by inertia. Most competitors are extinct. And people know by word of mouth, that google "is the best search engine".
About Firefox it might be tricky. People who decided to try firefox can be more interested in trying another search engine as well, so here their payment for default SE makes some sense.