According to a report, Apple was considering switching Safari to DuckDuckGo rather than Google

According to reports, Apple Inc. and DuckDuckGo have discussed using DuckDuckGo as the default search engine for Apple’s Safari browser’s private mode instead of Alphabet’s Google.

The specifics of the discussions between Apple and DuckDuckGo, which took place this week in the middle of Google’s antitrust hearing, will be made public, according to a report by the Bloomberg news agency. The testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive John Giannandrea will no longer be kept under cover, according to Judge Amit Mehta, who is presiding over a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google.

The discussions regarding prospective agreements between Microsoft and Apple and DuckDuckGo and Apple will soon be made public, according to a Bloomberg report.

The US Department of Justice said last month that Google, which controls 90% of the search industry, illegally paid $10 billion annually to mobile device manufacturers like Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T and others to be the default search provider on their products in order to maintain its lead.

In testimony on Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed that tech giants were competing for the massive amounts of information needed to teach artificial intelligence and that Google was securing content through expensive and exclusive arrangements with publishers.

In his testimony, Nadella discussed his company’s discussions with Apple about switching from Google to Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine for Apple’s Safari browser. Microsoft was willing to lose billions of dollars, according to Nadella, if Apple decided to switch.

According to Nadella, Google’s dominance as a search engine is a result of unfair strategies it employed, strategies that have also hampered Bing, a rival program from his firm.

Users often don’t have a lot of options when it comes to changing out of the default web browsers on computers and mobile devices, according to Nadella.

He stated, “We are one of the alternatives but we’re not the default”.

Nadella claimed that contracts that made Google’s browser the default one on desktops and mobile phones were to blame for the company’s dominance.