Google spent $26 billion to hide this phone setting from you

There’s a setting on your phone and web browser that Google is desperate to keep you from discovering. How desperate? In 2021 alone, Google paid Apple, Samsung and others $26.3 billion to keep it buried.

That’s more money each year than McDonald’s makes selling burgers.

This setting affects who gets to track your location and watch what you look up online. It affects the usefulness of the information you see and how much of your screen is taken up by ads.

I’m talking about your search engine — what pops up the answers when you type into the search bar. Google pays the makers of phones, laptops and browsers to be your default and to stop them from even presenting you other options during setup. It’s billions for a favor.

Most people haven’t thought much about the search function on their devices, much less how Google got there. But this default funny business might make you take a second look at not only Google, but also your trust in Apple, Samsung and other companies for selling you out.

The reason we’re able to pull back the curtain on the big business of default settings is because of an antitrust trial against Google underway in Washington, one of the largest in decades. The U.S. has accused Google of illegally using payments to phone makers and others to deter people from trying alternatives like the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo and or Microsoft-made Bing. We expect a verdict early next year.

You might be wondering: So what? Google has a reputation for good results, in part because it has data from so many users. What’s so bad about making Google the default?

What we’re learning from the trial flips that question on its head. If Google’s so good, then why does it need to spend as much as all the Big Macs combined to make sure we never even consider the alternatives? What have we been missing while Google has been our default? And how would we know if something better came along?

I, for one, changed my search engine because I don’t think any search engine can be the best without the best privacy practices. But even if you’re not interested in breaking up with Google, the choice ought to be yours.

The power of defaults

Tech companies know you’re way too busy to poke around in the settings. In fact, they’re counting on it.

We’re getting an inside view of how Google exploits this behavioral science, sometimes called the “power of defaults.” The idea is that defaults can nudge people’s choices one way or another, because most people are too distracted or confused to change them. Our apps and devices come filled with settings that benefit tech companies more than us — the “devil is in the defaults,” I wrote in 2018.

To get Google’s payout, we’ve learned in the trial, Google requires its partners to make Google the default and also (where allowed by law) not give us a choice during setup. In some cases, the companies also can’t actively encourage us to switch. This is called adding “friction” to our choices.

How does Google defend doing that? “We compete hard for promotional opportunities so that people can easily access Google, and our revenue sharing payments have increased over time because people are searching more with Google,” the company said in a statement.

Google said in its opening statements at the trial that anyone could switch to a different search engine with only a few taps. It also published a blog post with that claim.

To put that to the test, my colleague Tatum Hunter and I hit the streets of San Francisco and asked strangers to show us how to change the default search engine on their phone. We brought a stopwatch to time them.

No surprise: Most people were unable to change it in under two minutes, if at all. Many didn’t even understand that a search engine is different from a web browser (and you theoretically have choices in both).

On an iPhone, it takes 4 taps and some scrolling, once you know where to look. In certain Android phones, changing a search engine takes more than 10 taps because you have to change a browser setting and also a search bar on the home screen.

None of the confusion is our fault — it’s literally what Google pays for. An internal Google document revealed in the trial showed a reason for Google’s concern: It found when people changed their browser homepage away from Google, their searches with Google shrunk by 27 percent.

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