EU Google DMA ruling targets data and AI

EU's Google DMA ruling targets the data layer beneath search — and the AI layer above it

Brussels is set to conclude Google breached the Digital Markets Act by self-preferencing its own services in search results. The real stakes lie in mandatory data-sharing remedies and whether they extend to Gemini.

The European Commission is expected to conclude as early as the week of July 20, 2026 that Google violated the bloc's Digital Markets Act by prioritising its own shopping, travel, and hotel services over rival offerings in search results, according to Noah Intelligence. But the fines — reported by the Financial Times to run into hundreds of millions of euros across two DMA cases — are not the load-bearing element of this decision. The decisive question is whether the Commission forces Google to share the search-query, click, and ranking data that constitutes its competitive moat with rivals on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. If Brussels does so, and then applies the same logic to Google's Gemini AI assistant, it will have redefined what "platform dominance" means for the AI era — turning proprietary data from a strategic asset into regulated infrastructure.

The self-preferencing case: what Google did, and what Brussels found

The Commission opened formal non-compliance proceedings against Alphabet on March 25, 2024, investigating whether Google Search preferenced its own vertical search services — Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Shopping — over similar rival services, and whether Google Play prevented app developers from steering consumers to better offers outside the app store, according to the European Commission's Digital Markets Act portal.

On March 19, 2025, the Commission sent Alphabet two sets of preliminary findings. It informed the company of its "preliminary view that certain features and functionalities of Google Search treat Alphabet's own services more favourably compared to rival ones, thus not ensuring the transparent, fair and non-discriminatory treatment of third-party services as required by the DMA," per the European Commission press release. The Commission also found that Google Play's anti-steering rules violated the DMA.

The legal basis is Article 6(5) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, which states that gatekeepers "shall not treat more favourably, in ranking and related indexing and crawling, services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself than similar services or products of a third party," as set out in the Commission's case document. The Council of the European Union's 2026 review noted that the scope of the investigation is broad, covering "Alphabet's vertical search and content services in various areas, such as travel, e-commerce and hospitality," according to the Council document ST-9776-2026.

Alphabet has not yet been fined under the DMA — unlike Apple, which received a €500 million penalty, and Meta, which was fined €200 million on April 23, 2025, per the European Parliament's EPRS briefing. But Alphabet's reprieve appears temporary. CSIS analysis noted that "despite Alphabet's efforts" to modify search results to provide each vertical service with its own box, "recent reports suggest Alphabet will face fines early next year," according to CSIS.

This is not Google's first encounter with EU antitrust enforcement. The company has accumulated over €9 billion in fines across three previous cases: €2.4 billion for Shopping self-preferencing (2017, upheld by the European Court of Justice in 2024), €4.3 billion for Android tying (2018, trimmed to €4.1 billion and upheld by the ECJ on July 2, 2026), and €2.95 billion for ad-tech self-preferencing (2025, under appeal), as reported by BBC News. The DMA case is different because it does not require the Commission to prove competitive harm in a lengthy antitrust proceeding — the rules are ex ante, meaning non-compliance is itself the violation.

The data-sharing remedy: infrastructure, not penalty

The real leverage the Commission holds is not the fine. It is the remedy. In April 2026, the Commission sent Google preliminary findings on possible remedies, including measures that would give third-party search engines access to search data on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms under Article 6(11) of the DMA, according to Noah Intelligence.

Article 6(11) requires gatekeepers to provide "business users and third parties" with access to "ranking, query, click and view data in relation to free and paid search generated by end users on its online search engines," as the Brookings Institution's analysis notes. This is the same data that a US federal judge, Amit Mehta, ordered Google to share with qualified competitors in his September 2025 remedies ruling — though Mehta limited the scope to portions of Google's search index and user click-and-query data, excluding advertising data, as NPR reported. Google has appealed that ruling, arguing that forced data sharing "will impact our users and their privacy," according to BBC News.

The privacy tension is real. The DMA requires that transferred search data be "irreversibly altered" and not relatable to an identified person — a standard stricter than the US approach. But as Mark MacCarthy of Brookings observed, this "would require introducing so much noise into the data set as to destroy any usable pattern that could aid in the development of an alternative search engine." The rival search company DuckDuckGo has criticised Google's proposed anonymisation method in Europe as creating a dataset "unusable for search training purposes," per Brookings.

This is the core regulatory design problem: data that is useful enough to help a competitor build a better search engine is, by definition, data that carries reidentification risk. The Commission must solve this trade-off if its remedy is to have any market effect. A fine Google can absorb. A data-sharing order it cannot — because it attacks the scale advantage that makes Google's search quality self-reinforcing.

The Gemini extension: from search to AI assistants

The most consequential signal from Brussels is not in the search case at all. The Commission is "separately weighing whether Google should open up the same features used by its Gemini assistant to third-party AI providers," according to Noah Intelligence. This would extend the DMA's logic — that gatekeepers must not use control of one platform to advantage their own adjacent products — from search into the AI layer being built on top of it.

The precedent is already being set with Meta. On June 9, 2026, the Commission ordered Meta to allow rival AI chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, to access the WhatsApp Business API, calling it an interim measure to prevent "serious and irreparable harm to competition in this growing market," as BBC News reported. Competition chief Teresa Ribera framed the intervention in terms that apply equally to Google: "In rapidly evolving markets, competition can be lost long before a final decision is adopted."

The Commission has also opened a separate investigation into Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results — examining whether Google used data from websites to provide the service without offering "appropriate compensation" to publishers, and whether YouTube content was used to train Google's broader AI systems without an opt-out mechanism, according to BBC News. That investigation, combined with the Gemini access question, suggests Brussels is building a theory of the case in which Google's search dominance is a feeder for AI dominance, and the DMA's structural separation obligations should apply across the stack.

The Brookings Institution has argued that the DMA's existing framework — which prohibits self-preferencing, tying, and discriminatory platform access — "maps directly onto AI's emerging abuses in principle," even though the Commission has so far declined to expand formal DMA coverage to generative AI services. The Google search data-sharing remedy could function as a backdoor route to the same outcome: if rivals get access to Google's search query and click data, they can train competing AI models on the same behavioural signal that powers Gemini.

Winners and losers: who benefits if the remedy holds

The direct beneficiaries are vertical search competitors — Kayak, Skyscanner, Booking.com, and other travel, comparison, and shopping platforms that have long argued that Google's placement of its own services atop search results determines which businesses users see first. The Commission's preliminary findings specifically name Google Flights, Hotels, and Shopping as the services receiving preferential treatment, per CSIS.

The indirect beneficiaries are search competitors and AI assistant providers that would gain access to Google's data infrastructure. If the Article 6(11) remedy is enforced in a usable form — not so anonymised as to be worthless — it lowers the barrier to entry for building both alternative search engines and AI-powered search experiences. This is the logic that animated the US DOJ's remedy proposals as well: that Google's scale advantage in search data is "insuperable" without mandatory access, as the Brookings analysis described it.

The losers are Google and, by extension, any gatekeeper whose business model depends on using data from a dominant platform to train proprietary AI systems. Google's own data shows the DMA has already imposed costs: Oliver Bethell, Google's head of competition, has argued that European consumers "now complete 50 percent more searches to get to their desired destinations" and that "businesses report 30 percent less traffic to their sites," according to CSIS. A data-sharing remedy would compound that — not by degrading the user experience, but by giving competitors the raw material to match Google's quality.

The political loser is the Trump administration, which has warned of retaliation against EU tech enforcement, as the Financial Times reported. Five of the seven designated gatekeepers are American. The Commission's decision to push ahead regardless — confirmed by the ECJ's €4.1 billion Android ruling on July 2, 2026, per The Economist — signals that Brussels has calculated the transatlantic cost is bearable.

The regulatory convergence: Brussels, London, and Washington

The EU is not acting alone. On June 17, 2026, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to rank organic search results using "objective and non-discriminatory criteria," increase transparency around rankings, and allow users to transfer their search data to authorised third parties within three months, according to Al Jazeera. The CMA designated Google with "strategic market status" — the UK equivalent of the EU's gatekeeper designation — giving it the authority to impose targeted requirements without proving anticompetitive conduct.

The UK has also ordered Google to allow publishers to opt out of having their content used to power Google's AI Overviews, a "world-first requirement" according to CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell, as BBC News reported. That gives publishers leverage to negotiate content deals with Google — a remedy that directly addresses the compensation gap the Commission is investigating in its separate AI Overviews probe.

In the United States, Judge Mehta's September 2025 ruling established the first domestic precedent for mandatory search data sharing, though Google's appeal has paused implementation, per NPR. The convergence is imperfect — the US approach is litigation-driven and case-specific; the EU approach is regulatory and structural — but the direction is the same: Google's control over search data is being treated as a bottleneck, not a trade secret.

Diplomat View

The Commission's DMA decision on Google, expected the week of July 20, will mark the point where European digital regulation stops treating search as a consumer-facing product and starts treating the data beneath it as essential infrastructure. The fines will grab headlines; the remedy will shape markets. If Brussels mandates FRAND access to search query and click data in a form that is actually usable for training — and if it extends that logic to Gemini — the decision will do more than constrain Google. It will establish the principle that AI dominance built atop a regulated platform's data advantage is itself a competition violation. That principle, if it holds, applies to Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic, and every future vertical where a platform operator builds AI on data its competitors cannot access.

The forecast turns on three conditions. First, the data-sharing remedy must survive Google's inevitable appeal to the General Court — likely a two-to-three-year process. Second, the Commission must solve the anonymisation-utility trade-off in a way DuckDuckGo and other rivals do not dismiss as theatre. Third, the Gemini extension must move from internal deliberation to formal investigation before the Commission's political appetite for confrontation with Washington erodes. If all three hold, the decision redefines platform regulation for the AI era. If any one fails, Brussels will have fined Google again without changing the structure of its advantage.

• Week of July 20, 2026: European Commission expected to announce DMA non-compliance decision on Google Search and Google Play, with fines and a 60-day compliance window.
• September 2026: CMA deadline for Google to implement data portability requirements in the UK.
• 2027: European General Court likely to hear Google's appeal of any DMA data-sharing remedy — the venue where the anonymisation standard will be contested.