Search giant Google reportedly paid archnemesis Apple $1 billion to remain the default search engine for Apple’s mobile devices, according to a report by Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg made the claim based on court documents in a copyright lawsuit filed by Oracle Corporation against Google.
Google, which is now under the umbrella company Alphabet, pays Apple a percentage of the revenue it earns via search, but the exact percentage has never been disclosed.
Bloomberg reported the revenue sharing reached as high as 34 percent.
The court paper cited by the news agency is not longer available online, and neither Apple nor Google have commented.
Bloomberg reported that the transcript vanished without a trace from electronic court records earlier this week
Oracle's lawsuit claimed Google used its Java software to develop Android, Google’s mobile operating system, but never paid for it.
According to the BBC, the $1 billion amount has been reported before by firms such as Morgan Stanley.
"It's a very lucrative business to be the browser of choice on a device or the search engine on a device," Chris Green, a technology analyst at Lewis, told the BBC.
Alphabet launched in August of 2015 and is run by Google’s current leaders, including CEO Larry Page and his team of co-founder Sergey Brin and CFO Ruth Porat. Alphabet consists of two parts. One is the Google core business , which includes Search, Ads, YouTube, Android and Chrome, and falls under Google's new CEO, Sundar Pichai.
The other part of Alphabet is the potentially big new business industries far from Google’s search engine roots. That includes Google X (self-driving cars, delivery drones, internet balloons), Nest (smart thermostats), Google Fiber (a broadband service), Calico (longevity research), Life Sciences (contact lenses) and Google Ventures, which provides funding to new startup investments.
