Jonathan Tinter, a Microsoft vice president, testified today that Apple and other smartphone makers turned down revenue sharing agreements that would have helped his company's Bing search engine.

The DOJ accuses Google of paying $10 billion annually to wireless carriers and smartphone makers to ensure that Google search is the default on their devices. The government argues that Google has abused its monopoly in search and some aspects of search advertising.

Tinter said that Bing has struggled to win default status on smartphones sold in the United States, and that this smaller scale translated into poorer quality search.

"We were just big enough to play but not big enough to win," Tinter said. Source

In Bloomberg's report they added that Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella met with Apple CEO Tim Cook as part of the talks, said Jon Tinter, a Microsoft business development vice president who is on the stand during the US Justice Department’s antitrust trial in Washington against Alphabet. Microsoft would have taken a multi-billion dollar loss on the terms of the deal, Tinter said, but it would have bolstered Bing, eventually allowing it to gain more market share and revenue.

The software giant had secured a deal for Apple to use Bing in Siri and Spotlight, an Apple feature to help find apps on iPhones from 2013 to 2017, but wanted to expand that to Safari. Instead, Google wound up bolstering its own deal with Apple to include the products that had previously used Bing. For more review the Bloomberg report on Yahoo!Finance.

On Tuesday, Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple's SVP of Services testified that making Google the default search engine on iPhones made the most sense without a valid alternative." In light of Tinter's testimony today, I wonder if the DOJ asked Apple's VP of Services Eddy Cue why Bing wasn't considered a "valid alternative."

From Tinter's testimony today, it seems like Apple's decision simply came to money, using Microsoft's bid to force Google to pay more.