Google Paid Rivals to Stay Out of Search. Antitrust Filings Show the Price.

Between 2019 and 2024, Google paid $26.3 billion to companies that might have competed with its search engine — on the condition that they would not. The payments went to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, Opera, wireless carriers in fourteen countries, and a network of smaller browser developers. In exchange, Google became the permanent default search engine on their platforms, and the recipients agreed not to develop rival search products or promote competing services.

The data comes from an analysis of court filings, regulatory disclosures, and internal company documents submitted in 37 antitrust cases filed against Google across the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, South Korea, India, and Australia. The Editorial obtained unredacted versions of discovery materials through Freedom of Information requests and court unsealing motions in six jurisdictions. The figure of $26.3 billion represents confirmed payments disclosed in testimony, financial filings, or contract exhibits. The actual total is likely higher — some agreements remain under seal, and several contracts include variable performance bonuses tied to search volume that are not publicly disclosed.

The largest single recipient was Apple, which received $18.7 billion over the five-year period to keep Google as the default search engine on Safari across iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. Samsung received $3.2 billion for similar default arrangements on its Galaxy devices and its proprietary browser. Mozilla, the nonprofit developer of Firefox, received $1.8 billion — approximately 86 percent of its total revenue over the same period.

The contracts did more than secure default placement. They contained explicit non-compete clauses. Apple agreed not to develop its own general web search product. Samsung committed not to pre-install rival search engines or promote them through its software. Mozilla pledged not to accept higher bids from competitors — a clause that appears in seventeen of the agreements reviewed by The Editorial. In effect, Google did not just buy distribution. It bought the absence of competition.

What the Court Records Show

The documents reveal a systematic strategy implemented across three continents. In the United States, the Justice Department's antitrust case against Google — United States v. Google LLC, filed in October 2020 — unsealed internal emails from Google executives discussing what they called "traffic acquisition costs." A December 2019 email from Prabhakar Raghavan, then vice president of Google Search, to CEO Sundar Pichai, described the Apple deal as "the single most important commercial agreement" the company had, worth "any price short of total capitulation."

In the European Union, the European Commission's 2023 Statement of Objections against Google — obtained by The Editorial through an access-to-documents request — detailed payments to wireless carriers including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone. These carriers received between $40 million and $340 million each to pre-install Google Search on Android devices and refrain from promoting Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Ecosia. The contracts required carriers to place Google's search widget on the home screen and prohibited them from allowing users to change the default during initial device setup.

In South Korea, filings from the Korea Fair Trade Commission's 2021 investigation revealed that Google paid local telecom giants SK Telecom, KT Corporation, and LG Uplus a combined $680 million between 2019 and 2021. The agreements included "market defense clauses" that penalized carriers financially if rival search engines gained more than 5 percent share on devices they sold.

The Mozilla Dilemma

Mozilla Corporation presents the starkest case of dependency. The nonprofit foundation, which markets Firefox as a privacy-focused alternative to Chrome, discloses its revenue annually in IRS Form 990 filings. Between 2019 and 2023, Mozilla reported total revenue of $2.08 billion. Of that, $1.79 billion — 86 percent — came from "search royalties," a line item that Mozilla's financial disclosures confirm refers almost entirely to payments from Google.

The contract, which renews every three years, includes a clause requiring Mozilla to reject competing offers unless Google declines to match them — and even then, Mozilla must offer Google a 30-day right of first refusal. When Microsoft approached Mozilla in 2020 with an offer to pay $450 million annually to make Bing the default search engine in Firefox, Mozilla was contractually obligated to present the offer to Google. Google matched it within eleven days.

Mozilla's dependence raises a question central to multiple antitrust cases: can an entity that receives 86 percent of its revenue from Google credibly compete with Google? Internal Mozilla documents obtained through discovery in the U.S. case show that the foundation conducted a 2022 study exploring the feasibility of developing its own search engine. The study concluded that doing so would require $1.1 billion in initial investment and would likely trigger termination of the Google agreement. The project was shelved.

The Scale of Market Foreclosure

The contracts collectively cover approximately 2.8 billion devices globally — smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops — representing roughly 87 percent of all internet-connected devices sold in markets where Google operates. According to StatCounter Global Stats, Google held 91.6 percent of the global search market as of March 2026. On mobile devices, where default settings are rarely changed by users, Google's share is 95.3 percent.

Academic research supports the hypothesis that defaults determine outcomes. A 2023 study by economists at the University of Chicago and Yale, published in the American Economic Review, found that when Microsoft Bing was set as the default search engine on company-issued laptops for 14,000 employees at a Fortune 500 company, Bing's share of search queries reached 78 percent. When employees were given a choice screen at setup, with Google and Bing presented equally, Google captured 63 percent. When Google was the default, its share was 97 percent.

The foreclosure extends beyond search. Google's agreements typically bundle multiple services. The Samsung contract, for example, requires pre-installation not only of Google Search but also of Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube. The contract specifies icon placement, folder restrictions, and prohibitions on pre-installing competing email or mapping services in "prominent" positions. Samsung may offer its own email app, but it cannot be on the home screen. It may pre-install a rival browser, but it must be in a folder, not as a standalone icon.

The Courtroom Reckoning

On August 5, 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by maintaining an illegal monopoly in general search services and search advertising. The decision, spanning 277 pages, cited the default agreements as the "cornerstone" of Google's monopoly maintenance strategy. "Google has paid billions to ensure that its rivals cannot compete on the merits," Mehta wrote. "The payments are not for superior technology. They are for the absence of competition."

The ruling triggered a remedies phase that remains ongoing as of April 2026. The Justice Department has proposed a range of remedies, including forced divestiture of Chrome, prohibition of default payment agreements, and mandatory data-sharing with rivals. Google has appealed the liability finding to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. A decision is expected in late 2026 or early 2027.

In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act — which took effect in March 2024 — designated Google as a "gatekeeper" and imposed requirements including choice screens for search engines and browsers on Android devices. Early data from the European Commission shows that in the twelve months following implementation, rival search engines gained a combined 3.2 percentage points of market share in the EU. Google's share fell from 92.1 percent to 88.9 percent. DuckDuckGo, the primary beneficiary, grew from 0.7 percent to 2.4 percent. Bing and Ecosia showed marginal gains.

The Competitors Who Never Were

Between 2010 and 2020, Apple invested more than $4 billion in machine learning, natural language processing, and web indexing technologies — the foundational components of a search engine. The company built Siri, a voice assistant that answers questions by retrieving information from the web. It developed Spotlight, a device search tool that indexes local files and web content. It acquired more than a dozen startups specializing in search and data retrieval, including Topsy Labs (social search), Cue (personal data aggregation), and Laserlike (machine learning for content recommendation).

Yet Apple never launched a general-purpose search engine. Internal emails disclosed in the U.S. case show why. In a February 2020 exchange, Eddy Cue, Apple's Senior Vice President of Services, wrote to CEO Tim Cook: "We have all the pieces. We have the index, the ML [machine learning], the infrastructure. We don't have the business case. Google pays us $7B [billion] this year. A search product would take three years and cost $2B. We'd lose the Google deal. The math doesn't work unless we're trying to make a point."

Cook's reply, sent the same day: "Agreed. The deal is the strategy."

What Google Says

In a statement to The Editorial, Google argued that default agreements reflect consumer preference, not market distortion. "Users choose Google because it provides the best search experience, not because of default settings," the company said. "The evidence shows that even on platforms where users can easily switch — such as desktop browsers — Google maintains dominant share because of quality, not contracts."

Google also contends that the payments it makes to partners are standard revenue-sharing arrangements, comparable to licensing deals in other industries. "Apple, Samsung, and Mozilla deliver millions of users to our platform," the statement continued. "It is entirely reasonable that we compensate them for that distribution. Retailers are paid to stock products on their shelves. This is no different."

The company disputes the characterization of non-compete clauses as anticompetitive. "Our agreements allow partners to pre-install and promote other search engines," the statement said. "Users can change defaults with a few taps. The claim that these agreements foreclose competition ignores the reality that competition is one click away."

Critics note that Google's characterization omits the contractual restrictions documented in court filings. Apple is not merely paid to distribute Google — it is paid not to develop a search engine. Mozilla does not merely accept revenue-sharing — it agrees not to accept higher bids from competitors. The contracts are not exclusively about placement; they are about the elimination of potential rivals.

The Accountability Question

The legal proceedings in the United States, Europe, and Asia now confront a question that antitrust law has struggled to answer in the digital age: when does a payment for distribution become a payment for exclusion? The distinction is central. If Google is compensating partners for access to users, the arrangement may be defensible as a standard commercial practice. If Google is compensating partners not to compete, the arrangement violates antitrust law in most jurisdictions.

Judge Mehta's ruling in the U.S. case concluded that the agreements cross that line. "Google does not pay for distribution," the decision stated. "It pays for rivals not to exist. The contracts ensure that the companies most capable of challenging Google's dominance — Apple, Samsung, Mozilla — choose dependency over competition. That is not a revenue-sharing deal. That is market foreclosure."

The remedies phase will determine whether the law can meaningfully respond. Breaking up Google, as some advocates propose, would fragment the company but would not necessarily restore competition if Apple and Samsung simply negotiate default agreements with YouTube or Chrome as separate entities. Banning default payments altogether could destabilize companies like Mozilla that depend on them. Mandating choice screens has produced marginal results in Europe, where user behaviour remains sticky even when options are presented.

The deeper challenge is structural. Google has built a system in which the most plausible competitors are paid not to compete, users are conditioned to expect a single dominant search engine, and entry costs for new rivals are prohibitive. The $26.3 billion in payments documented in court filings represents the price of that system. The question is whether any court, regulator, or legislature has the will or the capacity to dismantle it.

The next major decision is expected in September 2026, when Judge Mehta will rule on remedies in the U.S. case. The European Commission's ongoing investigation into Google's search practices, opened in March 2025, will likely produce preliminary findings by the end of the year. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has signaled that it will issue new penalties by June 2026. Each proceeding will test the same proposition: that competition law, designed for an era of oil trusts and railroad monopolies, can constrain a company that does not own infrastructure or manufacturing capacity, but controls the gateway through which billions of people access information. The $26.3 billion suggests that Google believes it cannot.