It doesn’t really seem like there’s any evidence for a story where Google went out of their way to destroy any competing search engines. The worst thing the article references is an engineer who argued that search engine quality is directly proportional to search volume, which if true would imply that making Google better necessarily implies other search engines will be worse.
I think paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine, as well as within Chrome, counts as intentionally crippling other search engines.
If Apple made them default because they’re the best, then that’s fine. But spending a ton of money to keep themselves as the default, when they already have the vast majority of market power, seems like an artificial barrier to competition.
Unless another search engine is so much better that Apple is willing to forfeit billions of dollars of pure profit, then nobody else has a chance to be the default.
That makes a strange legal argument, though. You can't say that Apple putting the default up for bid is anti-competitive behavior by Google. So would you say that Google can't bid in the auction because that in itself is anti-competitive? That also seems like a tough legal argument to make (though I am not an expert on this) because it means that basically everybody is allowed to be in the auction except for Google.
You could definitely say it was anti-competitive if Google was paying more than they earned from this search traffic. But I seriously doubt they are doing that.
Apple made them the default because they are the best at monetization of large volumes of search queries from iOS devices. If another company was better at it, they'd put in a higher bid and rake in the profits.
Another search engine that is 90% there and can offer only 10% of payments might have been good enough (at least in a certain time frame) if it gave Apple an opportunity to snub Google.
