Google has been hit with a €890m (£760m) fine by the European Commission for breaching the bloc’s landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA) — the first major enforcement action against the tech giant under the new rules. The penalty, announced on 23 July 2026, is split into two separate violations: €460m for favouring its own flight and hotel booking services in search results, and €430m for Play Store rules that prevented app developers from steering users to cheaper offers outside Google’s own marketplace.
EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said companies should succeed because of the quality of their products — “rather than their market position”. EU tech boss Henna Virkkunen added: “After this decision, we want to make sure that there is more competition and also other companies are able to innovate.”
“EU fines Google €890m for breaching Digital Markets Act by favouring own apps”
Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, criticised the decision, arguing that complying with the EU’s requirements would damage services used by millions of Europeans. “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.”
The Commission rejected that argument, insisting the measures are necessary to prevent dominant platforms from disadvantaging rivals. It ordered Google to treat third-party services in search results in a “fair and non-discriminatory manner” and allow developers to make offers outside its app store.
Max von Thun, director of the Open Markets Institute Europe, called the fines 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. Europe’s startups and innovators cannot wait much longer,” he said.
The decision was not without geopolitical risk. Zach Meyers, director of research at the Centre on Regulation in Europe, noted a delay in finalising the penalty, which he said was likely driven “by a desire not to upset EU-US relations”. With US president Donald Trump frequently threatening tariffs, the Commission eventually concluded that “the US president’s unpredictability and unwillingness to comply with his own deals means that the EU has little to gain by treading softly”. A senior EU official insisted the bloc had a “sovereign right” to regulate US tech companies and that the timing was not connected to tariffs.
Google has previously received billions of euros in EU fines over separate competition cases. The company has already begun testing changes to how it displays search results featuring its own services, which the Commission described as “substantial progress towards compliance”. Consumers, a senior EU official said, will be direct beneficiaries: “Research results will be different in Europe. They will have to adapt their search engine going forward.”