FlashFeed

Full text

BRUSSELS — The EU fined Google €890 million on Thursday and ordered the U.S. internet giant to overhaul how it ranks rivals in search results and how it polices its app store, as it concluded two investigations into whether the company had breached the bloc’s flagship Big Tech law.

Google becomes the third company to face significant fines under the EU’s three-year-old Digital Markets Act, a rulebook meant to fast-track investigations into dominant tech platforms that has been denounced by Washington as discriminatory because most of the companies covered by it are American.

“Google has fallen short of effective compliance with the Digital Markets Act, and today we have taken decisive yet balanced enforcement action sanctioning these breaches,” said Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s executive vice-president for competition policy. “The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine.”

The decisions come over two years after the Commission opened the cases in March 2024, alongside parallel probes into Apple and Meta that were closed with fines in April 2025.

The Commission had internally reached a decision as long ago as March, prompting criticism from industry groups and civil society organizations that Brussels was slow-walking enforcement to avoid antagonizing Washington.

The larger fine, of €460 million, covers Google’s self-preferencing in search, where the Commission found Google gives its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results better placement than it gives competitors.

The second decision, for which Google has been fined €430 million, covers the Play Store installed on smartphones using the Android operating system. The Commission found Google restricted app developers from telling users about cheaper offers available outside the store, and charged steering-related fees beyond what the law permits.

The fines, while substantial, are far smaller than those levied against Google under the EU’s established antitrust regime — the bloc’s highest court recently upheld a fine of over €4 billion imposed in 2018 after the Commission found that Google had abused Android’s market dominance.

That’s because the DMA primarily seeks to address market dominance by engaging with firms to change how they operate.

Product degradation

Google pushed back sharply against the Commission’s verdict.

Kent Walker, its president of global affairs, said the rulings force Google to remove real-time Search features that Europeans rely on, like instant pricing and availability for hotels and flights, and to weaken safety protections on Play.

The Commission’s actions amount to “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants,” he said in a statement.

The company said it is evaluating its options, including an appeal.

Google has 60 days, or until late September, to comply or face a further infringement procedure that would entail daily financial penalties of up to 5 percent of parent company Alphabet’s daily worldwide turnover.

Ribera told reporters that the prospect of further penalties should force Google back to the negotiating table to reach a final solution under which it would fully comply with the DMA.

“It is quite a strong message to Google to say: we expect from you a serious proposal in terms of compliance,” she said. “The intention of our regulation is to ensure well-functioning markets, not to punish anyone. But, of course, in certain cases, we need to come up with sanctions.”

The Commission said Google has already begun testing some fixes, including changes to how it displays free services like shopping, hotels and flights, calling this “substantial progress.” Talks continue on how the rules will apply to Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The decisions land amid sustained pressure from Washington, where the Trump administration has cast EU penalties on American tech companies as a trade barrier.

The decision comes at a sensitive moment, one day before temporary U.S. tariffs on trading partners are due to expire. European officials fear the replacement tariffs could exceed a 15 percent ceiling envisaged under the transatlantic trade truce struck at U.S. President Donald Trump’s Scottish golf resort almost a year ago.

Ribera rejected the idea that political pressure played any role in the Commission’s enforcement decision.

“We are bound by the law,” she said. “I don’t think that any of us being part of the Commission could be respected if we could decide whether to do or not to do because someone else is trying to tell us what to do.”