It’s easy once, it’s incredibly difficult to do every time. As evidenced by the very few people who change their default search engine.

Not smoking a cigarette is also as easy as not buying or lighting.

Setting aside the issue of Google being the default search engine as a result of these payments, this is missing a major effect of these payments that is even more significant.

While what Google is paying companies like Apple for is technically just to make Google the default search engine, it's actually having the effect of making these companies (and particularly Apple) not bother to develop their own search engine because it's so profitable for them to just take the money from Google.

Apple is a company that usually prefers to develop its own services rather than use third party services (e.g. see maps), so it's highly likely that it would have created its own search engine by now if it wasn't getting so much money from Google.

If in effect Google is paying companies not to develop search engines (even if they aren't specifically agreeing not to do so), that seems like a pretty big issue when search engines are such an essential part of the internet.

Yes this is the crux of the argument.

The argument essentially is that Apple and Google are collaborating to collectively wall off the market and share the profits.

Because the Google search result experience is so bad, I do this to find better information more and more (already every other day). It's not a lot better, but better.