European Union Fines Google 890 Million Euros for Breaching Digital Markets Act Rules
The European Commission has fined Alphabet’s Google 890 million euros for breaching the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, in what stands as the largest penalty yet imposed under the bloc’s flagship digital competition law.
The decision follows two non-compliance proceedings that Brussels opened in March 2024, shortly after the DMA came into force. The first concerns self-preferencing in Google Search, where the Commission found that Alphabet gave its own services, including shopping, travel, hotel booking and financial results, more prominent placement than competing offerings. The second concerns Google Play, where the Commission found that the company restricted app developers from steering users toward alternative purchasing channels outside its own payment system.
The Commission set out its preliminary findings in March 2025, concluding that Alphabet displayed its own services at the top of search results and in dedicated spaces with enhanced visual formats, treatment not available to rivals. Google made a series of adjustments to its search results and store policies over the following months, but regulators judged those changes insufficient.
The largest penalty under the new regime
The fine surpasses the previous records under the DMA, the 500 million euros imposed on Apple over App Store steering rules and the 200 million euros levied on Meta over its consent model, both in April 2025.
Even so, the amount sits well below the ceiling available to regulators. The DMA allows fines of up to 10 percent of a gatekeeper’s total global annual turnover, rising to 20 percent for repeat breaches. Alphabet reported annual revenue of about 402.8 billion dollars in 2025, meaning the theoretical maximum would have run to tens of billions of euros. Commission officials have consistently framed the approach as a search for compliance rather than maximum punishment.
Part of a wider enforcement push
The penalty lands days after the Commission adopted separate decisions requiring Google to share search data with rival search engines from January 2027 and to open its Android operating system to competing artificial intelligence services. The bloc’s technology chief, Henna Virkkunen, presented those measures as widening the range of services available to European users.
Google has pushed back on both fronts. Kent Walker, the company’s head of global affairs, warned that the data sharing requirement risked undermining privacy and security protections for European users. The company has separately described the changes already made to Search under the DMA as a significant downgrade to the product in Europe, and is expected to challenge the latest decision before the EU General Court, a process that typically takes years and does not automatically suspend either the fine or the compliance deadline.
A costly decade in Brussels
The decision extends a long record of European enforcement against the company. Google was fined 2.42 billion euros in 2017 over its comparison shopping service, 4.34 billion euros in 2018 over Android, later reduced to 4.125 billion euros, and 1.49 billion euros in 2019 over AdSense. In September 2025 the Commission imposed a further 2.95 billion euros over advertising technology practices.
On 2 July 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed Google’s final appeal against the Android penalty, making that fine definitive and closing a case that had run since 2018. Taken together, EU penalties against the company now exceed 10 billion euros.
Why it matters
The significance is less the size of the cheque than the behavioural change attached to it. Compliance orders that reshape how search results are ranked and how app store economics work would alter the terms on which comparison sites, travel platforms, retailers and app developers reach customers, in Europe and potentially beyond as other jurisdictions study the DMA model.
For the region, the relevance runs on two tracks. Gulf sovereign funds and institutional portfolios hold substantial positions in large United States technology companies, so a steadily rising regulatory and litigation burden feeds directly into how that risk is priced. At the same time, as Gulf states build out their own digital economies and draft platform rules, the DMA is emerging as the most closely watched template for regulating dominant technology gatekeepers.
Outlook
Attention now turns to the compliance measures attached to the decision and the deadline the Commission has set for Google to implement them, with daily penalty payments available if it does not. Also in view are the January 2027 start date for search data sharing, the Android interoperability requirements, and a separate Commission investigation into whether Google demotes news publishers in search results.
Sources: European Commission; Al Arabiya; Financial Times; Court of Justice of the European Union.
