Lawsuit accuses Google of paying Apple to stay away from the search engine industry

A new class-action lawsuit filed by California Crane School, Inc. accuses Google and Apple of a non-compete agreement in violation of the Antitrust Laws of the United States. The lawsuit states that Google and Apple have agreed that Apple would not compete against Google in the internet search market.

The lawsuit states that in its non-compete agreement, Google and Apple agreed that Google would split its search profits with Apple. The lawsuit also accuses Apple of giving preferential treatment to Google by setting Google as the default search engine on all of its devices – and previous reports claim that Google paid Apple $15 billion in 2021 for this privilege.

California Crane School, Inc. also accuses Google of annually making multi-billion-dollar payments to Apple to keep Apple out of the search engine sector. Both companies have been accused of holding secret meetings between their executives.

The lawsuit blames Google for acquiring actual and potential competitors and claims that, through their non-compete agreements, Google and Apple suppress competition from smaller search companies and even remove search competitors from the market. By doing this, both companies are responsible for the higher advertising rates, which would be lower if there were a competitive system.

With its complaint, California Crane School, Inc. wants the seizure of the billion-dollar payments made by Google. The lawsuit also seeks a ban on Google and Apple's non-compete agreement and wants a mandate that prevents both companies from sharing the profits generated by the advertising rates.

California Crane School also wants Google's preferential treatment on all Apple devices to end, as well as the billion-dollar payments. The complaint requests that Apple and Google be split into independent companies, similar to how Standard Oil was split into smaller companies.

The Standard Oil Company formed an oil monopoly through anticompetitive actions, thus violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that the Standard Oil Company should be geographically divided into separate companies.