Australia’s competition watchdog is requesting powers to develop and implement a cyber system that will require internet users to be presented with a choice of a search engine after they warned Google’s “harmful” market dominance was severely stifling competition. The Australian Competition and Consumer Competition (ACCC) said in its third interim report for an inquiry into digital platform services that Google had leveraged its wealth to entrench itself as Australia’s universal search engine, with its current market share sitting at 94 percent. In particular, based on public estimates, the ACCC confirmed that Google had paid Apple over US$10 billion (AU$13.2 billion) in 2020—or around 15 to 20 percent of Apple’s net income that year—to be the default search engine in Apple’s browser, Safari, and the default search query service in its voice assistant, Siri. “Google pays billions of dollars each year for these placements, which illustrates how being the default …