Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, but search-quality issues got in the way
Apple CEO Tim Cook, left, and Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services attend the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 10, 2019.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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 quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition,” Google wrote in the filing.
The Justice Department said in its own newly unsealed filing that Microsoft has spent almost $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. The Windows and Office software maker launched Bing in 2009, following search efforts under the MSN and Windows Live brands.
Today Bing has 3% global market share, according to StatCounter. In the fourth quarter, Microsoft generated $3.2 billion from search and news advertising, while Google search and other revenue totaled $48 billion.
Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing’s quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.
“Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, according to the filing. “And so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t as good. They weren’t investing at any level comparable to Google or to what Microsoft could invest in. And their advertising organization and how they monetize was not very good either.”
Google said Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to Apple executives about the assessment of Bing, but his remarks are redacted in the filing.
Representatives for Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified in the trial that he has “focused every year of my tenure as CEO to see if Apple would be open” to a default arrangement for Bing.
Cue testified that “if Apple did not receive the massive payments it sought from Google, Apple would have developed its own search engine,” the Justice Department asserted in its filing.
Bloomberg reported in September, citing unnamed individuals, that in around 2020 Microsoft executives held “exploratory” talks with Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, about selling Bing to Apple.
WATCH: It’s unclear if Google can retain its dominance in tech, says Loop’s Rob Sanderson
Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.
CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.
“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”
The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on April 4 that he would again postpone enforcement of a law banning TikTok unless its Chinese owner ByteDance divests from the platform.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview aired on Sunday that he has a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy TikTok, whose identities he can reveal in about two weeks.
Trump added that the deal will probably need Beijing’s approval to move forward, but said “I think President Xi will probably do it,” in reference to China’s leader Xi Jinping.
The president made the off-the-cuff remarks while discussing the possibility of another pause of his “reciprocal” tariffs on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
Tiktok’s fate in the U.S. has been in doubt since the approval of a law in 2024 that sought to ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. The legislation was driven by concerns that the Chinese government could manipulate content and access sensitive data from American users.
Earlier this month, Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest from the platform’s U.S. business. It was his third extension since the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok law just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January. The new deadline is Sept. 17.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, of PAFACA, had originally been set to take effect on Jan. 19, after which app store operators and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.
TikTok went dark in the U.S. ahead of the original deadline, but was restored after Trump provided it with assurances on the extension.
Trump, who credited the app with boosting his support among young voters in the last presidential election, has maintained that he would like to see the platform stay afloat under new ownership.
Potential buyers that have voiced interest in the app include Trump insiders such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison to firms like AppLovin and Perplexity AI.
However, it’s unclear if ByteDance would be willing to sell the company. Any potential divestiture is likely to require approval from the Chinese government.
A deal that would have spun off TikTok’s U.S. operations and allowed ByteDance to retain a minority position had been in the works in April, but was derailed by the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, Reuters reported that month.
The president previously floated a proposal for American stakeholders to buy the company and then sell a 50% stake to the U.S. government as part of a joint venture.
Experts have previously told CNBC that any potential deal could face legal challenges in the U.S., depending on whether it complies with PAFACA.
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