Google’s litigator cringes in court after witness reveals secret data about its deal with Apple

We’ve mentioned more than a few times that the U.S. v. Google antitrust trial has revealed interesting information about Google’s search revenue sharing with Apple and other firms. While there had always been talk of such deals, testimony elicited during the trial drew out more specific details. For example, University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy was on the witness stand today, and information he said under oath brought out a reaction from Google’s main litigator, John Schmidtlein.

On the stand, Murphy revealed that Google pays Apple 36% of its revenue from search advertising via the Safari browser. That this data had never been made public before was obvious from Schmidtlein’s reaction when the figure was said in the courtroom. The attorney “visibly” cringed when the percentage was mentioned by the witness.

Understandably, Google would want to keep that figure secret, not necessarily to prevent the public from knowing this percentage, but to keep it away from other manufacturers like Samsung that might want to renegotiate their own deal with Google if they ever found out how much Apple was receiving. And Google knew this as last week it submitted a filing with the court saying that revealing more information about its deal with Apple “would unreasonably undermine Google’s competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties.”

Apple and Google have had a revenue-sharing agreement that predates the iPhone and goes back to 2002. The agreement is considered to be the most important of Google’s deals with hardware manufacturers since it also calls for Google to be the default search engine on the iPhone. However, these deals are being used by the Justice Department as evidence to prove that Google is making these payments to prevent other search engines from becoming the default option on tech devices. And that could be considered anti-competitive.

If the DOJ does win its case and proves that Google is being anti-competitive in search, it could demand that the company be broken apart into different business units.