(Bloomberg) — Two years after Apple Inc. abandoned Google Maps as the default service on iPhones in favor of its own app, Google had recovered only 40% of the mobile traffic it had on its service. mapping, a Google executive said. in the antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.
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Michael Roszak, Google’s vice president of finance, said Tuesday that the company is using the Apple Maps switch as a “data point” to model what could happen if the iPhone maker replaced Google’s search engine as the engine with default on Apple’s Safari browser.
In a June 2020 email to his supervisor at the time, Roszak shared data on how Apple’s change affected the use of Google Maps on iPhones.
“Nearly two years later, we were at about 40% of the previous peak (and we assumed the actual loss was greater since Apple Maps usage was also increasing during this period),” Roszak wrote in an email filed in court. The graphic Roszak included in the email showing Google Maps usage on iPhone has been removed from the public version of the document.
The Justice Department says Google illegally maintained a monopoly on online search by paying billions of dollars to ensure its search engine was the pre-selected option, known as the default, on browsers Web and smartphones. Google’s biggest deal is with Apple, which set Google as the default provider on Safari in exchange for a share of the revenue the search engine earns from advertising.
Read more: Google says digital ad budgets are shifting to Amazon
The exact amount Google pays Apple for its default status is not public. The Justice Department said in its opening statement that Google paid between $4 billion and $7 billion for Safari’s default in 2020 — a statement that led to an objection from Apple’s lawyers the next day, as this is a public estimate and not the actual figure.
Roszak said Tuesday that he was not aware of any data kept by Google on how many users change the default search settings on their browsers or mobile phones. The Apple Maps example was “a data point that we used” to estimate how iPhone owners might react to a change in default search settings, he said.
Read more: What’s at stake in Google’s antitrust lawsuit
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