Apple Inc. and Google LLC today were grilled in front of a Senate judiciary antitrust subcommittee regarding anticompetitive behavior.

The hearing, titled “Antitrust Applied: Examining Competition in App Stores,” included testimony from lawyers from Spotify Technology SA and Match Group, the parent company of the Tinder dating app. The two companies have for a long time pushed back against the two tech giants for having to share revenue from digital sales.

Match Chief Legal Officer Jared Sine explained that around one-fifth of all sales go to Apple and Google, the single largest expense that the company has. He said that money could go back to the consumer or go towards innovations. Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify’s head of global affairs and chief legal officer, was similarly critical, saying that no one is “free-riding” in the App Store. Instead, he said, it’s the “creativity of third-party app developers that created demand for Apple’s devices.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal asked questions about a call that Match received from Google on Tuesday, which Sine said consisted of Google wanting to know how Match would testify in the hearing. It seems Match had changed its stance and Google wanted to know why.

Blumenthal said that the tone of the call sounded like a “threat,” saying he would investigate the matter. Wilson White, Google’s senior director for government affairs, responded that Google would never issue such a threat and was only interested in open dialogue. Gutierrez said that he had experienced similarly threatening behavior from Apple on at least four occasions, stating, “They’ve basically thrown the book at us in a number of ways to make it hard for us to continue to sustain our decision to speak up.”

“We all appreciate app stores and the roles that Apple and Google have played in helping to create many of the technologies that have defined our age,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the subcommittee. “We’re not angry about success. It’s about new products coming on. It’s about new competitors emerging. This situation, to me, doesn’t seem like that’s happening.”

Representatives for both Apple and Google fired back, saying the fees that companies made were in place to strengthen security and to ensure consumers don’t download unsafe apps. When Senator Josh Hawley asked Apple Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer for more details, Andeer wouldn’t say if all the money went to security.

Photo: Yuri Samoilov/Flickr