Google has revealed that Microsoft had proposed to sell the Bing search engine

Google claimed in the petition earlier this month that Microsoft approached Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2020

In a court filing earlier this month, Google revealed that Microsoft made an offer to sell the Bing search engine to Apple in 2018. On Friday, a document from Google's antitrust lawsuit against the US Department of Justice was made public. Google has important agreements with Apple and Android phone makers to guarantee the exclusivity of its search engine, and these agreements are at the center of the legal dispute over whether Alphabet has a monopoly in web search advertising. A graphic presented during the October trial showed that Google spent more than $26 billion in 2021 to maintain its search engine as the default.

Google has been making an effort to demonstrate fair competition. Google claimed in the petition earlier this month that Microsoft approached Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2020 regarding setting Bing as the default online browser for Apple's Safari browser. Each time, Apple rejected the proposal, citing Bing's quality issues. In a recently released, confidential document, the Justice Department stated that Microsoft has invested about $100 billion in Bing over the course of two decades. After conducting search operations under the MSN and Windows Live identities, the company that makes Office and Windows software introduced Bing in 2009. Although his comments are censored in the document, Google claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook emailed Apple executives regarding the evaluation of Bing.