The European Commission has announced today that it has fined Google a total of 890 million euros: the US tech company is accused of violating the Digital Markets Act, the regulation promoting competition in the European Union’s digital markets, which fully came into effect in 2024.
The amount, although significant, is still much lower than the maximum cap set by the Digital Markets Act, which can reach up to 10 percent of the company’s annual global turnover. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, closed 2025 with a record revenue of 402.8 billion dollars.
THE TWO FINES
The sanction consists of a first fine of 460 million for favoring its own services in search results, to the detriment of competitors, in the sectors of online shopping, hotels, and transportation. The second fine, of 430 million, concerns the restrictions applied by Google on its app store, called Google Play, which prevented developers from freely informing users about more affordable offers available on other platforms.
These are the first fines imposed by the European Union on Google under the Digital Markets Act, but the fifth and sixth for violations of antitrust rules: in total, the company has received fines exceeding 10 billion euros over the past twenty years, as detailed by Reuters.
THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION’S POSITION
Henna Virkkunen, the Commissioner responsible for the Union’s technological sovereignty, explained that the Digital Markets Act “is meant to ensure fair conditions for all. With these decisions,” she said, referring to the two fines, “we want to make sure there is competition.”
GOOGLE’S RESPONSE
Google will have sixty days to comply with the European Commission’s decision, which it criticized, also indicating that it might appeal in court.
“To comply with the new rules,” the company explained, “we are forced to remove real-time search features that Europeans appreciate, such as instant price updates and direct availability of hotels, flights, and restaurants, as well as dismantle some Google Play security protections.”
“This is not fair competition,” Google continued, but “a deterioration of products imposed by a small group of complainants acting in their own interest, to the detriment of European businesses and consumers. Regulation should improve products, not make them worse.”
WHAT NOW?
The European Commission has nevertheless spoken of a “constructive dialogue” with Google and significant progress in its compliance with the Digital Markets Act, implying that daily penalties for potential non-compliance with the regulation will probably not be applied. Brussels explained that Google has already “started testing changes to how it presents its services on Google Search for free services like shopping, hotels, and flights.”
The Commission also said it welcomed the changes Google made to the Google Play rules governing user redirection to external offers.
CRISIS AHEAD WITH THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION?
Before Google and still within the scope of the Digital Markets Act, the European Commission had already fined Apple and Meta last April. About a month ago, it also preliminarily established that the cloud computing divisions of Amazon and Microsoft should be considered gatekeepers: that is, entities capable, by virtue of their size, of controlling access to digital markets and the conditions of service use.
According to the Commission’s intentions, the Digital Markets Act is the tool that will allow the European Union to reduce the market power of so-called Big Tech in order to protect its “technological sovereignty.” However, the Old Continent does not have comparable alternatives to the technologies offered by American companies.
This regulatory offensive against Big Tech is not welcomed by the United States, the EU’s main political allies and trading partners: the Donald Trump administration has repeatedly threatened trade retaliation, arguing that European regulations discriminate against American companies, which indeed dominate digital markets.
