Google Paid $26.3 Billion to Stay the Default. That Is a Moat

Google paid $26.3 billion in one year to remain the default search box on your phone. What does it actually cost to take one customer away from a company like that? Educational content only. No investment, tax or legal advice. Chapters: 00:00 The Price of Staying the Default 01:25 The Test From the Challenger's Side 02:37 Moats That Raise Acquisition Cost 04:01 Moats That Raise Unit Cost 05:39 The Gate: Licences and Rules 06:58 Durability and the Real Question 08:51 Outro Sources: Market competition, earnings management, and persistence in accounting profitability around the world | Review of Accounting Studies — https://link.springer.com/article/10.... Firm profitability: Mean-reverting or random-walk behavior? (Journal of Economics and Business) — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... Is your strategy good enough to move you up on the power curve? | McKinsey & Company — https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities... How Strategy Champions win, from insight to strategy execution | McKinsey — https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities... Google loses massive antitrust case over its search dominance : NPR — https://www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-... The Google search antitrust case is a triumph for behavioral economics – Knight-Georgetown Institute — https://kgi.georgetown.edu/research-a... TSMC to spend $42 billion on expansion in 2025 — ambitious plans detail nine production facilities | Tom's Hardware — https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-ind... TSMC 2024 Annual Report — https://investor.tsmc.com/static/annu... Learning curves: What does it mean for a technology to follow Wright's Law? — Our World in Data — https://ourworldindata.org/learning-c... A critical assessment of learning curves for solar and wind power technologies (Oxford Institute for Energy Studies) — https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp... Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers (White House, July 2015) — https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/... Prepared Testimony before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary (Jason Furman, CEA) — https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/... Occupational Licensing | Cato Institute — https://www.cato.org/publications/fac... Airline Deregulation — The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Econlib) — https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/A... The Fare Skies: Air Transportation and Middle America | Brookings — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/th... Persistence of profits and the systematic search for knowledge — R&D links to firm above-norm profits (CESIS working paper) — https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/cesisp/...