Apple's price for keeping Google as the default search engine for iOS was $3 billion last year, but demands are going way up for 2018: according to Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall, the asking price is being tripled to $9 billion. Hall predicts that amount will increase even further in 2019, to $12 billion. It's unclear if Google's supplanting Microsoft as the default search provider for Siri and Spotlight last year is responsible for the purported price hike from Apple, though it may, at least partially, explain the sudden jump. The other explanation could be that previous estimates of the value of the agreement between the two tech giants were undervalued, given that apart from the $1 billion figure from 2014, we don't really have any hard evidence pertaining to the actual sum of these payments.