The historic U.S. v. Google antitrust trial is investigating Google’s search business, and this week, Apple Exec Eddie Cue defended the deal between the two tech giants, testifying that it was in the company’s best interest to continue to use Google’s search engine as a default.

The Information Services Agreement, or ISA, is central to the case, which made Google’s search engine the default on Apple’s products, and was the primary topic because Cue was responsible for negotiating its current restatement with Google in 2016.

As one of the highest-profile witnesses so far, Cue was pressed about the details of the deal by the Justice Department because the agreement grants Google the right to be the default search engine on all Apple devices and pays Apple billions of dollars a year.

During the interrogation, Cue said Apple asked for the percentage of the revenue Google made from Apple users it directed toward the search engine, but specific numbers were not revealed and instead were reserved for closed discussion.

According to The Verge, eventually, the companies agreed on a number also excluded from court, and Google has been paying Apple that number since.

“I always felt like it was in Google’s best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done,” Cue said.

According to Justice Department lawyer Meagan Bellshaw, she questioned Cue if he would have said no to the deal if the two sides couldn’t decide on a revenue-share figure. He said he’d never really considered that an option.

“I always felt like it was in Google’s best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done,” Cue said.  

He reasoned that the deal was about more than money and that Apple did not sincerely consider moving to an alternative provider or building its own search product.

“Certainly, there wasn’t a valid alternative to Google at the time,” he asserted.

Also critical to the DOJ’s case was the question of whether Apple picked Google because it’s the most lucrative choice or the best product.

To demonstrate this, Bellshaw asked Cue several questions about the iPhone setup process, and then screenshots were presented to showcase the defaults already installed.

“We try to get people up and running as fast as possible,” Cue said in answer to the examination and that Google allows the user to change settings.

“We make Google be the default search engine,” he said, “because we’ve always thought it was the best. We pick the best one and let users easily change it.”

Google lawyer John Schmidtlein walked Cue through an account of the Google and Apple partnership related to the Safari browser and how things used to be to today’s default search engines.

“Before 2003,” Cue said, “the way that you searched the web was you had to go in and you had to type in google.com in the URL field, or you could type in another URL. We came up with the idea that if you type anything in the URL field that’s not a URL, it just goes to search.”

Schmidtlein was working towards Cue proving Google helped Safari prosper not by compelling Apple but by being a great product that combined faultlessly with Apple’s own applications and devices.

With this testimony and case, the DOJ appears to be zeroing in if Google was not the best search engine, and Apple stopped writing checks, what would the search engine landscape look like?

According to Cue, Apple has not entertained this, but the Justice Department seems to be trying to hint that Apple should begin to.