• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 8, 2025

Google could be seeing some massive disruption to its search business. This has parallels to the transformative industry-shaking moves when TV cord-cutting reared its ugly head.

Apple is considering dropping Google as the default search option because search usage has dropped in April -- for the first time ever, according to testimony of Eddie Cue, senior vice president of services of Apple, in court on Wednesday.

Why? Analysts say this is about consumers increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI).

That is not good news. Apple gets Google essentially for free -- a savings of a whopping $20 billion a year -- a benefit of Apple’s revenue share deal with Google.

This comes as the U.S. Department of Justice is pushing to break up Google’s business. For Google, it could yield a much bigger outcome. Search revenue is 57% of Alphabet revenue.

Google could lose a billion iPhone users who use their phones for search perhaps a dozen times a day if Apple shifts to non Google third-party AI search platforms.

For many, this is akin to the massive industry shift back in August 2015 -- at least as it was mulled over on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Wednesday.

About ten years ago, Disney disclosed for the first time that there was some cord-cutting with its cable TV networks -- especially ESPN, the biggest cable TV channel, which these days pulled in about $16 billion a year from all revenue sources, including advertising and cable carriage fees.

From that moment on, everything changed in the legacy, linear TV business, not just for Disney but for all legacy TV-networks.

Disney stock has not been the same since. The business continues to deal with major pain due to cord-cutting, as Disney's stock performance can attest to since that time.

This comes as Google stands to lose its dominance -- some would say virtual monopoly -- of the search business due to the Federal government's efforts to break up the company.

Now we might see those rapidly growing AI platforms -- including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Nvidia, Claude, DeepSeek and Grok -- taking over.

Are those companies and platforms on the same trajectory as the streamer where the likes of Netflix, Prime Video, Roku, Tubi, and Apple TV+ and other streaming or CTV-related services are now?

More importantly, where will Apple and Google then go from here?