Google has been fined a total of €890m (£760m) by the European Union for breaching the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, in a landmark enforcement action targeting the tech giant's dominance in search and its Play Store.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, imposed separate fines of €460m for giving its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results better placement than rivals, and €430m for restricting app developers from steering consumers to cheaper offers outside Google’s app store.
“EU fines Google €890m for breaching Digital Markets Act by favouring own services in search and restricting app developers.”
“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 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 commission ordered Google to treat third-party services in search results in a “fair and non-discriminatory manner” and to allow app developers to make offers outside the Play Store. A senior EU official said consumers would be direct beneficiaries: “Research results will be different in Europe, they will have to adapt their search engine going forward.”
Google has already started testing changes to how it displays search results featuring its own services such as shopping and flights, which the commission noted represented “substantial progress towards compliance”. The company pushed back sharply against the verdict, and can appeal the decision and ask for interim measures including a suspension of the order.
The fines come more than two years after the commission opened investigations 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, drawing criticism from industry groups that Brussels was slow-walking enforcement to avoid antagonising Washington.
The timing of the fine, only hours before a series of temporary US tariffs against about 60 countries were due to expire, risks stirring tensions with the Trump administration. A senior EU official insisted the bloc had the “sovereign right” to regulate US tech companies in its own jurisdiction and that the timing was not connected to tariffs.
Google becomes the third company to face significant fines under the three-year-old Digital Markets Act, a rulebook that has been denounced by Washington as discriminatory because most of the companies it covers are American. The €890m penalty, while substantial, is far smaller than the €4bn fine upheld against Google in 2018 for abusing Android's market dominance, reflecting the DMA’s focus on engagement over punitive measures.
