Google has been fined a total of €890m (£759m) by the European Commission for breaking the EU’s Digital Markets Act – the first major enforcement action under the landmark law designed to curb the power of the world’s biggest tech companies.
The penalty, announced on Wednesday, consists of two separate fines: €460m for prioritising its own services – such as hotel and flight deals – in search results over rivals, and €430m for preventing app developers from steering consumers towards cheaper offers outside Google’s own Play Store.
“EU fines Google €890m for search and app store breaches under Digital Markets Act.”
EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said companies should succeed because of the quality of their products, not their market position. “The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” she said.
Google immediately criticised the decision. Kent Walker, the firm’s president of global affairs, argued that complying with the EU’s requirements would damage services used by millions. “To comply, we are having to strip away real-time Search features Europeans love – like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights and restaurants – and dismantle safety protections on Google Play,” he said. “This isn’t fair competition.”
EU officials rejected that argument, insisting the measures are necessary to prevent dominant platforms from disadvantaging rivals. EU tech boss Henna Virkkunen said: “After this decision, we want to make sure that there is more competition and also other companies are able to innovate.”
Max von Thun, director of the Open Markets Institute Europe thinktank, described the fine as the “bare minimum” for a company that made revenues of just over $400bn last year. “Having finally established Google’s non-compliance, the commission must now move quickly to force Google to end its anti-competitive practices once and for all,” he said. “Europe’s startups and innovators cannot wait much longer.”
The commission noted that Google had already started testing changes to how it displays search results featuring its own services, describing those changes as “substantial progress towards compliance”. The company now has 60 days to comply with the regulations – or challenge them by taking the Commission to court.
Google has a long history of disputes with European regulators, having previously received billions of euros in fines over separate competition cases, including a €4.1bn penalty for using Android to block rivals.
The timing of the decision risks provoking a reaction from Donald Trump, only hours before a series of temporary global tariffs against about 60 countries expires. A senior EU official said the bloc had the “sovereign right” to regulate US tech companies in its own jurisdiction and that the timing was not connected to tariffs.