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.
"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. 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