Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, but search-quality issues got in the way [Video]

Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google’s antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday.

The legal battle over whether Alphabet has a monopoly in web search advertising touches on key agreements Google has in place with Apple and Android phone makers to ensure exclusivity of its search engine. In 2021, Google spent more than $26 billion to keep its search engine the default, according to a slide shown during the trial in October. Google has been trying to prove in the case that it competes fairly.

In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple’s Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing.

“In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative …