US: Apple reups Google Search deal

Apple’s former general counsel Bruce Sewell recently said the deal to make Google the default search engine for Safari on iPhones and Macs is worth billions and took about four months of daily negotiations to complete, according to a report by CNBC.

“The Google negotiation for example, between Apple and Google over search, probably took us four months,” Sewell said, adding that he was “meeting almost every single day” with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and also with Kent Walker, general counsel for Google.

“And then with myself and either Tim [Cook] or Eddy Cue who was my counterpart on that deal. They’d be at Google or we’d be at Apple almost every day, it’s just one example there are a lot of those kinds of negotiations or lawsuits that just completely suck up all your time,” he said.

The comments were taken from a Youtube video at Columbia Law School where Sewell was interviewed by a student about his long career in law.

Apple never said just how much it gets paid by Google, but court documents show that Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014. Another estimate puts the amount at $9.5 billion last year. Sewell worked for Google from 2009 to 2017. Safari is the second most popular search engine after Google.

Sewell said he was the head of 900 people in Apple’s legal department and that the department had a budget just under $1 billion. He would report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and he said that Cook would send him a lot of emails very early in the morning.

“Tim is a little crazy in his work schedule,” Sewell said. “From 4:00 a.m. to 5 a.m., there’s a there’s a lot of activity, so my first thing when I got up around 6:30 a.m. would be to check my email and see all the stuff that Tim had left for me, the little cookies he’s left for me.”