Slashdot has confirmed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that after 18 years of legal maneuvering, SCO's bankruptcy case (first filed in 2007) is now "awaiting discharge."

Long-time Slashdot reader rkhalloran says they know the reason: Papers filed 26 Aug by IBM & SCOXQ in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for a proposed settlement, Case 07-11337-BLS Doc 1501:

By the Settlement Agreement, the Trustee has reached a settlement with IBM that resolves all of the remaining claims at issue in the Utah Litigation (defined below). The Settlement Agreement is the culmination of extensive arm's length negotiation between the Trustee and IBM.

Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee, on behalf of the Estates, of $14,250,000. For the reasons set forth more fully below, the Trustee submits the Settlement Agreement and the settlement with IBM are in the best interests of the Estates and creditors, are well within the range of reasonableness, and should be approved.
The proposed order would include "the release of the Estates' claims against IBM and vice versa" (according to this PDF attributed to SCO Group and IBM uploaded to scribd.com). And one of the reasons given for the proposed settlement? "The probability of the ultimate success of the Trustee's claims against IBM is uncertain," according to an IBM/SCO document on Scribd.com titled Trustee's motion: For example, succeeding on the unfair competition claims will require proving to a jury that events occurring many years ago constituted unfair competition and caused SCO harm. Even if SCO were to succeed in that effort, the amount of damages it would recover is uncertain and could be significantly less than provided by the Settlement Agreement. Such could be the case should a jury find that (1) the amount of damage SCO sustained as a result of IBM's conduct is less than SCO has alleged, (2) SCO's damages are limited by a $5 million damage limitation provision in the Project Monterey agreement, or (3) some or all of IBM's Counterclaims, alleging millions of dollars in damages related to IBM's Linux activities and alleged interference by SCO, are meritorious.

Although the Trustee believes the Estates would ultimately prevail on claims against IBM, a not insignificant risk remains that IBM could succeed with its defenses and/or Counterclaims
The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware told Slashdot that the first meeting of the creditors will be held on September 22nd, 2021.

In Facebook's "widely viewed content report" released last week, The Verge's Casey Newton noticed something arguably just as damning as the spread of COVID-19 misinformation or rise of vaccine hesitancy: almost all of the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter were effectively plagiarized from elsewhere. From the report: Facebook's report details the top 20 most widely viewed posts on the network over the past three months. One of the posts was deleted before Facebook published it. Of the remaining 19, though, only four appear to have been original. The remaining 15 had been published in at least one other place first, and were then re-uploaded to Facebook, sometimes with small changes. [...] Facebook has long been home to reappropriated content, from the freebooting scandal during 2017's pivot to video to the more recent phenomenon of Instagram's Reels being flooded with videos bearing TikTok watermarks. But this kind of dumb, cheap growth hacking should sound familiar to anyone who paid even passing attention to the 2016 election. Russia's infamous Internet Research Agency commissioned a troll army to build up big followings on innocuous-seeming Facebook pages using a wide variety of engagement bait, then gradually shifted those pages to begin sharing more divisive political memes.

That's all much harder to do now, thanks to a variety of measures Facebook has taken to make it more difficult for people to disguise their identities or countries of origin. The company now routinely removes networks of pages where the creators' identities are suspect. And it's worth saying that in the most recent election, inauthentic behavior of the 2016 variety did not play a significant role. Most importantly, Facebook now has a policy against "abusive audience building" -- switching topics and repeatedly changing a page's name for the purpose of growing a following. But it seems notable that for domestic actors, the tactics not only work, but remain the most effective way to reach a large audience five years later. Steal some questions that went viral somewhere else, spam them on your page, and presto: you're one of the most-viewed links for the entire quarter on the world's biggest social network. "The plagiarists who dominate Facebook's top 20 links are likely doing it primarily for clout and ill-gotten audience growth," Casey goes on to say. "But some of the other characters here appear to have more direct monetary incentives..."

Tim Cook celebrated 10 years as Apple CEO by collecting and selling off three quarters of a billion dollars' worth of stock. CNN reports: The transactions were revealed in a regulatory filing Thursday, which showed that Cook had acquired and sold more than 5 million shares of the iPhone maker. As head of the world's most valuable company, Cook has received lofty stock awards in recent years. One of the incentives was tied to Apple's performance in the S&P 500 over the past three years. The stock award was triggered this week because the firm was one of the index's top performers, generating shareholder returns of nearly 192% from August 2018 to 2021, it said in a filing. Cook's windfall came just days after he also donated 70,000 Apple shares (worth about $10 million) to charity, according to a separate regulatory filing Tuesday. It did not disclose the name of the recipient.

Cook joined Apple in 1998 and served in a variety of senior roles before assuming his current position, including chief operating officer and executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations. He was named CEO in August 2011, after co-founder Steve Jobs famously stepped down. Jobs died weeks later from complications of pancreatic cancer. Prior to joining Apple, Cook worked at Compaq and IBM (IBM).

The City of Chicago filed two sweeping lawsuits against DoorDash and Grubhub for allegedly deceiving customers and using unfair business practices. From a report: The suits echo long-standing claims from restaurant owners that the platforms advertise delivery services for their businesses without their consent and conceal lower prices that restaurants offer directly to customers, outside of the platforms. The city also claims both platforms use a "bait-and-switch" method to attract customers with low delivery fees, only to charge additional ones when they are about to place their order. In separate statements, both DoorDash and Grubhub called the lawsuits "baseless." [...] In November, DoorDash stopped adding new restaurants that it doesn't have agreements with to its app. It also said it will remove restaurants that don't want to be listed within 48 hours of being notified.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Charlie Osborne: The parents of two teenagers allegedly responsible for stealing $1 million in Bitcoin are being sued. According to court documents obtained by Brian Krebs, Andrew Schober lost 16.4552 in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2018 after his computer was infected with malware, allegedly the creation of two teenagers in the United Kingdom. The complaint (.PDF), filed in Colorado, accuses Benedict Thompson and Oliver Read, who were minors at the time, of creating clipboard malware. The malicious software, designed to monitor cryptocurrency wallet addresses, was downloaded and unwittingly executed by Schober after he clicked on a link, posted to Reddit, to install the Electrum Atom cryptocurrency application.

During a transfer of Bitcoin from one account to another, the malware triggered a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack, apparently replacing the address with one controlled by the teenagers and thereby diverting the coins into their wallets. According to court documents, this amount represented 95% of the victim's net wealth at the time of the theft. At today's price, the stolen Bitcoin is worth approximately $777,000. "Mr. Schober was planning to use the proceeds from his eventual sale of the cryptocurrency to help finance a home and support his family," the complaint reads. The pair, tracked down during an investigation paid for by Schober, are now adults and are studying computer science at UK universities. The mothers and fathers of Thompson and Read are named in the complaint. Emails were sent to the parents prior to the complaint requesting that the teenagers return the stolen cryptocurrency to prevent legal action from being taken. However, the requests, sent in 2018 and 2019, were met with silence.

Schober's complaint claims that the parents "knew or reasonably should have known" what their children were up to, and that they also failed to take "reasonable steps" in preventing further harm. In response (.PDF), the defendants do not argue the charge, but rather have requested a motion to dismiss based on two- and three-year statutes of limitation. "Despite his knowledge of his injury and the general cause thereof, Plaintiff waited to file his lawsuit beyond the two and three years required of him by the applicable statutes of limitations," court documents say. "For this reason, Plaintiff's claims against Defendants should be dismissed." However, Schober's legal team has argued (.PDF) that the teenagers were not immediately traced, and roughly a year passed between separately identifying Read and Thompson. Schober's lawyers have requested that the motion to dismiss is denied.

T-Mobile said a cyberattack earlier this month that exposed millions of customer records was carried out using specialized tools to gain entry to the network, followed by brute force-style hacking techniques to access user data. From a report: "In short, this individual's intent was to break in and steal data, and they succeeded," Chief Executive Officer Mike Sievert said Friday in a statement, the company's fullest account yet of what happened. The company has hired cybersecurity provider Mandiant and consulting firm KPMG to improve its defenses, he said. The breach, the fourth that has compromised T-Mobile customer records in as many years, involved personal information including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver's license information. Sievert said the company is working with law enforcement and can't share further details of what happened. Further reading: T-Mobile Hacker Explains How He Breached Carrier's Security.

Crucial and Western Digital have recently been caught swapping the TLC NAND used for certain products with inferior QLC NAND without updating product SKUs or informing reviewers of this change. Now, Samsung was caught doing something similar. Samsung is "swapping the drive controller + TLC for a different, inferior drive controller," according to ExtremeTech. "The net effect is still a steep performance decline in certain tests." From the report: The other beats of this story are familiar. Computerbase.de reports on a YouTube Channel, which compared two different versions of the Samsung 970 Plus. Both drives are labeled with the same sticker declaring them to be a 970EVO Plus, but the part numbers are different. One drive is labeled the MZVLB1T0HBLR (older, good) and one is the MZVL21T0HBLU (newer, inferior). Peel the sticker back, and the chips underneath are rather different. The Phoenix drive (top) is older than the Elpis drive on the bottom. Computerbase claims a production date of April 2021 for the Phoenix, but if the 2110 and 2123 codes are production dates, this would seem to indicate March and June. It's possible that Samsung uses specific numerical codes for each month. Either way, the Phoenix drive is older and faster and the Elpis drive is newer and slower.

And -- just as we've seen from Crucial and Western Digital -- performance in some benchmarks after the swap is just fine, while other benchmarks crater. [...] The original 970 Plus starts with solid performance and holds it for the entire 200GB test. The right-hand SSD is even faster than the OG 970 Plus until we hit the 120GB mark, at which point performance drops to 50 percent of what it was. Real-world file copies also bear this out, with one drive holding 1.58GB/s and one at 830MB/s. TLC hasn't been swapped for QLC, but the 50 percent performance hit in some tests is as bad as what we see when it has been.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: China is not done with curbing the influence local internet services have assumed in the world's most populous market. Following a widening series of regulatory crackdowns in recent months, the nation on Friday issued draft guidelines on regulating the algorithms firms run to make recommendations to users. In a 30-point draft guideline published on Friday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) proposed forbidding companies from deploying algorithms that "encourage addiction or high consumption" and endanger national security or disrupt the public order.

The services must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness and their algorithms must not be used to create fake user accounts or create other false impressions, said the guidelines from the internet watchdog, which reports to a central leadership group chaired by President Xi Jinping. The watchdog said it will be taking public feedback on the new guidelines for a month (until September 26). The guidelines also propose that users should be provided with the ability to easily turn off algorithm recommendations. Algorithm providers who have the power to influence public opinion or mobilize the citizens need to get an approval from the CAC. Friday's guidelines appear to target ByteDance, Alibaba Group, Tencent and Didi and other companies whose services are built on top of proprietary algorithms.

Unnervingly futuristic, these bulky, high-tech toothbrushes promise to scrub your choppers thoroughly in 20 seconds. WSJ: Dentists like Dr. Lana Rozenberg are overly familiar with two eternal fibs: that their clients floss regularly, and that they brush their teeth for at least two minutes twice a day. "Most people don't brush their teeth for two minutes," said the Manhattan-based industry veteran. "Thirty seconds is more like it," or under a second for each of their 32 teeth. But what if, in those 30 seconds, a device could reach the front, back and sides of every tooth at once? That's the proposition of new "whole mouth" toothbrushes, which rely on vibration and a preponderance of bristles packed inside a structure resembling a mouthguard to deliver an up-to-snuff scrubbing in as little as 20 seconds -- 10 each for top and bottom sets of teeth.

"It helps make things way faster, way easier and feels a little more guaranteed because you actually feel it on each one of your teeth," said Kristopher Paul, a medical-transportation driver in St. Petersburg, Fla., who has bit down on a 360 Sonic Brush Pro ($70) each morning for the past year. Mr. Paul, 36, also likes the tool's 15-minute whitening mode, which combines a blue LED light and whitening gel to fade bothersome coffee stains.

A team of scientists from a Swiss university has discovered a way to bypass PIN codes on contactless cards from Mastercard and Maestro. From a report: The now-patched vulnerability would have allowed cybercriminals to use stolen Mastercard and Maestro cards to pay for expensive products without needing to provide PINs on contactless payments. Discovered by a team from the Department of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich university, the attack is extremely stealthy and could be easily deployed in a real-world scenario if new bugs in contactless payment protocols are discovered. The general idea behind the attack is for an attacker to interpose itself between the stolen card and a vendor's Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal, in what security researchers would normally call a Man/Person/Meddler-in-the-Middle (MitM) scenario.

To achieve this, an attacker would require: a stolen card, two Android smartphones, a custom-made Android app that can tamper with a transaction's fields. The app is installed on both smartphones, which will act as emulators. One smartphone will be placed near the stolen card and act as a PoS emulator, tricking the card into initiating a transaction and sharing its details, while the second smartphone will act as a card emulator and be used by a crook to feed modified transaction details to a real-life PoS terminal inside a store.

The U.S. intelligence community said Thursday that it was divided over the exact origin of Covid-19 in China. CNBC reports: "After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident," the unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. In May, President Joe Biden ordered a closer intelligence review of what he described as two likely scenarios of the origins of the Covid-19. "Here is their current position: 'while two elements in the IC leans toward the [human contact] scenario and one leans more toward the [lab leak scenario] -- each with low or moderate confidence -- the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other," Biden said. Developing...

Elise Blanchard, writing on Mozilla blog: [...]

What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. I often hear that blue was chosen as the hyperlink color for color contrast. Well, even though the W3C wasn't created until 1994, and so the standards for which we judge web accessibility weren't yet defined, if we look at the contrast between black as a text color, and blue as a link color, there is a contrast ratio of 2.3:1, which would not pass as enough color contrast between the blue hyperlink and the black text. Instead, I like to imagine that Cello and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1 had just come out a few months before the beginning of both projects, and this interface was the first to use blue prominently as a selection color, paving the way for blue to be used as a hyperlink color.

Additionally, we know that Mosaic was inspired by ViolaWWW, and kept the same gray background and black text that they used for their interface. Reviewing Mosaic's release notes, we see in release 0.7 black text with underlines appearing as the preferred way of conveying hyperlinks, and we can infer that was still the case until something happened around mid April right before when blue hyperlinks made their appearance in release 0.13. In fact, conveying links as black text with underlines had been the standard since 1985 with Microsoft 1, which some once claimed Microsoft had stolen from Apple's Lisa's look and feel.

I think the real reason why we have blue hyperlinks is simply because color monitors were becoming more popular around this time. Mosaic as a product also became popular, and blue hyperlinks went along for the ride. Mosaic came out during an important time where support for color monitors was shifting; the standard was for hyperlinks to use black text with some sort of underline, hover state or border. Mosaic chose to use blue, and they chose to port their browser for multiple operating systems. This helped Mosaic become the standard browser for internet use, and helped solidify its user interface as the default language for interacting with the web.

For Zapotec artist and weaver Porfirio Gutierrez, colour is a way to connect with his ancestors' way of life, which has sustained civilisations by living in symbiosis with nature. BBC: Back home in the village of Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, Porfirio Gutierrez is referred to by his indigenous community as "El Maestro." In Ventura, California, where he lives now, and to the contemporary art world that he is courting, he is an artist with a mission. But for Gutierrez, the job is the same: to conserve, preserve and innovate, when necessary, generations' worth of wisdom and culture associated with the making of one thing that keeps everything interesting -- colour. But not just any colour. These colours are derived from nature, meaning that Gutierrez's charge is to discover new and old ways of plucking plants and insects straight out of the natural world and transform them into the pigments that give forth the glorious, rich, fullness of natural dyes.

Bins of these dried plants and insects in Gutierrez's Ventura studio are all colours in waiting. The most unusual of them all is a shimmering silver bead-like insect called cochineal that will spend its next life as a luxurious red dye. These bugs are cultivated year after year in the same way that seeds are saved by farmers, passing environmental wisdom from generation to generation. Gutierrez cultivates his own cochineal on an impressive wall of prickly pear cactus leaves installed in his studio. The insects grow like parasites on the the leaves, consuming the cactus juice which produces carminic acid in their body cavities. When dried and ground they miraculously transform into a velvety powder and the base for a red colour.

When compared with the synthetic dyes that are used today in essentially all our clothes and textiles, nature's version is almost always inexplicably better. It's the visual equivalent of a peach ripened by the tree, or a tomato baked in sunshine. Some lost part of you recognises that this is how it's supposed to be. Natural dyes are no different. Across time and cultures, we've been carpeting cave floors and dipping our jeans in dye, not because they won't otherwise function but because colour makes life's banal objects durable and our memories last longer. And if you are as blessed with knowledge as Gutierrez is, then that colour also grounds you spiritually and connects you to your ancestors' way of life -- a way of life that sustained civilisations by living in symbiosis with nature. A way of life that 500 years of colonisation has systematically erased.

Microsoft is announcing today that it won't block people from installing Windows 11 on most older PCs. While the software maker has recommended hardware requirements for Windows 11 -- which it's largely sticking to -- a restriction to install the OS will only be enforced when you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 through Windows Update. From a report: This means anyone with a PC with an older CPU that doesn't officially pass the upgrade test can still go ahead and download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually. Microsoft announced its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements in June, and made it clear that only Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPUs were officially supported. Microsoft now tells us that this install workaround is designed primarily for businesses to evaluate Windows 11, and that people can upgrade at their own risk as the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability. Microsoft won't be recommending or advertising this method of installing Windows 11 to consumers.

Duckstation, an emulator that allows users to run Playstation games, was recently made available for installation onto the latest generation of Xbox consoles. From a report: It's time to jog those nostalgia muscles, as the emulator will not only be able to play your PS1 favorites but also scale those games up to native 4K resolution at 60fps. In addition to the 4K treatment, Duckstation will let gamers improve the overall look of the emulation experience in a couple of other ways.

Turning this on disables dithering, an effect that was built into the original Playstation hardware. Dithering in layman's terms was basically a function to improve depth of color by underpinning graphics with a series of lines or dots, which were then blurred by the system's video encoders. Turning this on helps improve graphic capabilities by smoothing out the blocky textures on 3D objects. The original low-poly graphics of the PS1 would often look cruder as they enlarged, so this function basically smoothes out those clunky compositions.

Brussels is set to launch a formal competition probe early next month into Nvidia's planned $54 billion takeover of British chip designer Arm, after months of informal discussions between regulators and the US chip company. From a report: The investigation is likely to begin after Nvidia officially notifies the European Commission of its plan to acquire Arm, with the US chipmaker planning to make its submission in the week starting September 6, according to two people with direct knowledge of the process. They added that the date might yet change, however. Brussels' investigation would come after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority said its initial assessment of the deal suggested there were "serious competition concerns" and that a set of remedies suggested by Nvidia would not be sufficient to address them. The UK watchdog said it feared the deal could "stifle innovation across a number of markets" including by giving Nvidia the power to hurt its rivals by limiting their access to Arm's technology. Nvidia announced a plan in September last year to buy the UK chip designer from SoftBank, the Japanese investment conglomerate.

Microsoft has warned thousands of its cloud computing customers, including some of the world's largest companies, that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases, according to a copy of the email and a cyber security researcher. From a report: The vulnerability is in Microsoft Azure's flagship Cosmos database. A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies. Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft's Cloud Security Group. Because Microsoft cannot change those keys by itself, it emailed the customers Thursday telling them to create new ones. Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz. Microsoft's email to customers said it has fixed the vulnerability and that there was no evidence the flaw had been exploited. "We have no indication that external entities outside the researcher (Wiz) had access to the primary read-write key," according to a copy of the email seen by Reuters.

China's Supreme People's Court said the overtime practice of "996", working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, is illegal, taking aim at the controversial policy that is common among many Chinese technology firms. From a report: China's top court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security on Thursday published guidelines and examples on what constituted as overtime work, saying they were focusing on the issue as it had attracted widespread attention recently. While the authorities used a case involving a parcel delivery company to explain why "996" was illegal, working such hours had become a badge of honour for some Chinese companies and employees.

Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital's Mike Moritz have highlighted it as a competitive advantage the country had over the United States. But a backlash surfaced in 2019, prompting a public debate about work hours in China's tech industry that has continued. Last month, TikTok owner ByteDance on Friday said that it would formally end its weekend overtime policy from Aug. 1, two weeks after its short-video rival Kuaishou announced a similar decision. The court and ministry's criticism of "996" also comes amid a wide ranging Beijing-led regulatory crackdown on country's technology giants that has targeted issues from monopolistic behaviour to consumer rights.

Tesla wants to sell electricity directly to customers in Texas, according to an application filed by the company this month with the Public Utility Commission there. From a report: The application follows the start of a big battery build out by Tesla in Angleton, Texas (near Houston), where it aims to connect a 100 megawatt energy storage system to the grid. Texas Monthly first reported on the application, submitted by a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla called Tesla Energy Ventures. Tesla has also built several utility-scale energy storage systems around the world, including one east of Los Angeles, another underway in Monterey, California, and two in Australia -- one in Geelong, Victoria, and another in Adelaide, South Australia.

Apple announced today it has reached a proposed settlement in a lawsuit filed against it by developers in the United States. The agreement, which is still pending court approval, includes a few changes, the biggest one being that developers will be able to share information on how to pay for purchases outside of their iOS app or the App Store -- which means they can tell customers about payment options that aren't subject to Apple commissions. The settlement also includes more pricing tiers and a new transparency report about the app review process. From a report: The class-action lawsuit was filed against Apple in 2019 by app developers Donald Cameron and Illinois Pure Sweat Basketball, who said the company engaged in anticompetitive practices by only allowing the downloading of iPhone apps through its App Store. In today's announcement, Apple said it is "clarifying that developers can use communications, such as emails, to share information about payment methods outside of their iOS app. As always, developers will not pay Apple a commission on any purchases taking place outside of their app or the App Stores."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Reinsurance giant Swiss Re announced Wednesday that it had signed the world's first long-term agreement to take carbon directly out of the air. The contract with Climeworks AG, one of the world's leading direct air-capture startups, will net the climate technology company $10 million over 10 years. Mischa Repmann, a senior environmental management specialist with Swiss Re, said the deal would not only help his company reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, it could inspire other business considering the use of carbon capture technology. "It's a call for action, and we're hoping that others will follow," he said.

Climeworks, a Switzerland-based company, is set to open a plant in Iceland in September that will filter CO from ambient air using geothermal energy. The captured CO will then be dissolved in water and pumped deep underground for permanent storage in nearby rock layers. While underground, the gas reacts naturally with its surroundings to form rock, preventing the carbon from reentering the atmosphere. The company says the facility will have the capacity to capture and store 4,000 tons of CO per year. [...] Swiss Re and Climeworks didn't specify how much carbon would be removed in fulfillment of their contract and were vague about the cost, saying only it would be several hundred dollars per ton. Climeworks says the average price will decline as its operations grow, and may be as low as $200 a ton by 2030.

It's long been known that Google pays Apple a hefty sum every year to ensure that it remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Now, a new report from analysts at Bernstein suggests that the payment from Google to Apple may reach $15 billion in 2021, up from $10 billion in 2020. 9to5Mac reports: In the investor note, seen by Ped30, Bernstein analysts are estimating that Google's payment to Apple will increase to $15 billion in 2021, and to between $18 billion and $20 billion in 2022. The data is based on "disclosures in Apple's public filings as well as a bottom-up analysis of Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) payments." Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that Google is likely "paying to ensure Microsoft doesn't outbid it." The analysts outline two potential risks for the Google payment to Apple, including regulatory risk and Google simply deciding the deal is no longer worth it:

In an interview earlier this year, Apple's senior director of global privacy Jane Horvath offered reasoning for the deal, despite privacy concerns: "Right now, Google is the most popular search engine. We do support Google but we also have built-in support for DuckDuckGo, and we recently also rolled out support for Ecosia."