In general, making contracts with 3rd parties that negatively impact your competitors is sort of looked down upon.
"Do you think Google would continue to pay Apple if there was no search competition? Why would they do that?"
Of course not and the reasons should be obvious. Microsoft being a competent competitor costs Google a lot of money. Lose the search dominance and the place basically shuts down, so they're willing to pay a lot to maintain it.
“I would love an opportunity to sort of not have them pay — maybe on behalf of the Google shareholders.”
Shut down Bing then and save Google shareholders a bunch of money, at the expense of Apple shareholders. He clearly doesn't want to spend what Google does for the same privilege. Google must perceives that the deal is worth it to do for their shareholders.
I imagine his ideal outcome would be something like Microsoft was forced to do with browsers, having a screen during the setup process asking the user what browser (or in this case search engine) they want as the default. I honestly don't think it would move the needle at all unless Bing was demonstrably better than Google.
I cannot see how this is true.
Microsoft, with its tens of billions in annual profits, can invest in all the advertising in the world, literally, to let people know how to change the default browser on their iOS or Android device.
It is a trivial setting to change.
What is not trivial, for Microsoft, is creating a competitive search engine and advertising business.
Most/many people won’t it undeniably gives a massive advantage to google.
So they can other have a just as good as Google’s product that they do not want to spend enough on to make default, or they do not offer enough of a value proposition for people to go to settings -> Safari -> default search -> bing.
This case exists because it's the opinion of the United States Department of Justice that this law was broken by Google.
