EU hits Google with its first Digital Markets Act fine: 890 million euros

The European Commission fined Google 890 million euros, or roughly $1 billion, on July 23 for two separate breaches of the Digital Markets Act — the company's first penalty under the two-year-old law, even though Google has already been fined multiple times under the EU's older, general-purpose antitrust rules. The Commission split the fine into 460 million euros for self-preferencing violations on Google Search and 430 million euros for restricting how app developers can steer Google Play customers toward cheaper purchase options elsewhere.

The distinction between this fine and Google's other recent EU penalties matters. Just last September, Google was hit with a 2.95 billion euro fine for anti-competitive ad-tech practices — but that penalty was issued under Article 102 of the EU's general antitrust treaty, a decade-old legal framework that took a 2012 investigation more than a decade to conclude. The Digital Markets Act, by contrast, is built specifically to move faster: it names a short list of "gatekeeper" platforms up front and imposes clear, enumerated obligations rather than requiring regulators to prove abuse of dominance case by case. Thursday's fine is the first test of whether that faster mechanism actually produces faster enforcement against Google specifically, even as the Commission has already used the DMA against Apple (1.84 billion euros over music app distribution) and Meta (roughly 1 billion euros combined across two separate DMA cases).

On the Search violation, the Commission found that Google gives its own shopping, hotel, transport, and sports results preferential placement and richer visual treatment — star ratings, booking widgets, larger images — that competing travel and comparison sites can't access on equal terms. This is a direct application of DMA Article 6(5), which requires gatekeepers to rank third-party services on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms relative to their own. On Google Play, the Commission determined that the fees Google charges developers for steering users to outside payment options, and the length of time those fees apply, go beyond what the DMA allows — even though the law explicitly permits Google to charge some fee for the initial customer relationship it facilitates.

Google now has 60 days to bring both practices into compliance or face additional penalty payments of up to 5% of its worldwide daily turnover for every day it remains in breach — a mechanism designed to avoid the years-long compliance disputes that have followed Google's other EU antitrust cases. As reported by BleepingComputer, the Commission noted Google has already begun testing changes to how its own services appear in search results and has adjusted its Play Store steering terms, which regulators described as "substantial progress" — though apparently not enough to avoid Thursday's fine. Google is expected to appeal.

For competitors — travel metasearch sites, comparison shopping engines, and app developers who've spent years arguing Google's design choices amount to a tax on discoverability — the fine is a concrete, if modest, win. 890 million euros is a rounding error against Google parent Alphabet's roughly $400 billion in annual revenue, and the real leverage sits in the 60-day compliance clock and the threat of daily penalty payments rather than the fine itself. Whether Google's search redesign satisfies the Commission — or triggers yet another multi-year dispute over what "non-discriminatory ranking" actually requires in practice — will likely become clearer only after the deadline passes in late September.