Default PlacementThin moat

Reinforcing Android is a web of default-placement agreements — arrangements that make Google the pre-set search engine on browsers and devices Google does not itself control, keeping it one tap away wherever people go. These deals are immensely valuable precisely because defaults are so powerful; the overwhelming majority of people never change the setting they are given, so being the default is very nearly the same as being the only choice.

The power of a default is one of the most reliable facts in all of technology: inertia governs behavior, and whatever a device does out of the box is what nearly everyone continues to do. By paying to be the default search engine — most famously on the world's most valuable smartphones¹ — Google guarantees that the front door to search opens onto its own box for billions of people who will never think to change it.

The economics are extraordinary: Google pays enormous sums for these placements, and they are worth every penny, because the traffic they guarantee feeds the flywheel and the auction that fund everything else. It is cheaper and surer to buy the default than to win each user's choice, and Google has spent lavishly to make certain that no matter whose device or browser a person uses, Google search is what greets them.

For the owner, default placement rates as thin — the most exposed thread in the whole franchise — precisely because it is at once enormously valuable and easy to portray to a court as an unlawful purchase of monopoly. Courts have already found these deals illegal; the remedy that followed stopped short of banning the payments but prohibited exclusive distribution deals², which leaves the partners Google pays free to feature rival search and AI products beside it — and that is why this wall, sturdy as its results have been, is the one an owner should watch most warily.