The U.S. government has Google in its sites.
Since the Department of Justice antitrust trial started six weeks ago, the state has argued that Google uses its deep pockets to convince big tech companies like Apple and Samsung to keep its search engine as the default, in turn squeezing out smaller competitors like DuckDuckGo and Dogpile.
"These trials are designed to discover information that looks at behaviors that result in lower competition, and that does not look good from the (Google/Apple) relationship," Aneesh Chopra, former White House CTO told CNBC Monday.
It has been revealed during the U.S. Department of Justice's case against that Google's parent company Alphabet GOOGL paid tech companies more than $26 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine on their devices. The company pays Apple AAPL about $19 billion a year, according to a recent note from Bernstein analysts.
Related: Apple could also lose big if Google loses DOJ's antitrust case
But what has also been revealed is that not only does Google pay to be the default search engine, but it also pays so that those companies don't work on a search engine themselves.
"The dollar itself makes a lot of news, but I think the more important question is what behaviors resulted from that payment. In my personal view we are kind of guiding our way through to a settlement whereby the behaviors will be constrained," Chopra said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai testified Monday, defending his company in the trial saying that Google's intent is to make the user experience "seamless and easy."
Pichai told the court that part of the payments were meant to encourage those companies into making costly security upgrades and other improvements to their devices, ABC News reported.
Pichai has been credited as the lead negotiator for the company when Google renewed its partnership with Apple in 2016. Google handles over 90% of search queries worldwide, according to Oberlo
The trial began Sept. 12 in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C., but the judge in the case isn't expected to make a ruling until early next year.
If it loses the antitrust case, Alphabet could be stopped from buying its way into being the default search engine on other tech companies' devices.
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