On July 16th, 2026, the EU issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act.
The aim of the first specification measure is to ensure that competitors’ Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) services can compete with Google’s own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google’s Android devices.
The aim of the second specification measure is to rebalance the playing field by giving third-party search engines access to search data that only Google Search can collect at scale.
INDEX
- FACTUAL BACKGROUND
- LEGAL BACKGROUND
- THE SPECIFICATION DECISIONS
- INTEROPERABILITY WITH GOOGLE ANDROID
- GOOGLE SEARCH DATA
- IMPORTANCE OF THE DECISIONS: A PATTERN OF ENFORCEMENT
FACTUAL BACKGROUND
Google’s relationship with EU competition enforcers did not begin with the Digital Markets Act (“DMA” or the “Act”). By the time the DMA entered into force, the Commission had already spent the better part of a decade building a record of formal antitrust cases against the company, mostly under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union which focuses on the prohibition of abuse of a dominant market position. Google has been fined multiple times over its infringements, with record sanctions including €2.42 billion for favouring Google Shopping in 2017 and €4.34 billion for tying Android to Google’s own apps and services in 2019. Said records are part of the reason Google was one of the first companies the Commission had in mind when it began designing a faster, more predictable alternative to case-by-case litigation.
That alternative arrived on 6 September 2023, when the Commission formally designated Alphabet, alongside Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft, as a gatekeeper under Article 3 of the DMA.[1] The designation was not a discretionary judgement call in Google’s case as the company comfortably met the quantitative thresholds set out in Article 3(2) of the Act: EU revenues above €7.5 billion in each of the preceding three years, a core platform service used by more than 45 million monthly active end users and at least 10,000 business users in the EU, and a presence sustained over three consecutive years. These three margins create a rebuttable presumption of gatekeeper status. Eight of Google’s services were swept into the designation as core platform services in their own right: Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube, the Android operating system, Chrome, Google Shopping and Google’s online advertising services. No other gatekeeper was designated for as many services at once, a reflecting the real importance of Google’s various products as gateways between European businesses and European consumers.
The designation triggered a compliance rush. Under Article 3(10) of the DMA, gatekeepers have six months from designation to bring their conduct into line with the Regulation’s obligations, meaning Google was required to be fully compliant across all eight designated services from 7 March 2024. It is what happened after that date, or, more precisely, what Brussels considers not to have happened adequately, that sets the stage for the specification proceedings. These proceedings were opened in January 2026, with the preliminary findings and proposed measures published in April 2026, and the final decisions announced in July 2026. It is worth noting that specification proceedings clarify how a DMA obligation should be implemented to ensure compliance. Specification proceedings are distinct from non-compliance investigations, and do not aim to assess the gatekeeper’s compliance with the DMA. Therefore, they do not provide for the imposition of fines.[2]
LEGAL BACKGROUND
Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (the “Regulation”), otherwise known as the Digital Markets Act, entered into force in November 2022 and became applicable in May 2023, following of years of case-by-case antitrust enforcement, which made the Commission unable to keep up with the fast evolution of digital markets. The Google Shopping case was Exhibit A for that concern: a practice identified as harmful in 2017 was not definitively confirmed as unlawful by the courts until 2024, by which time the market it was meant to protect had moved on. The DMA’s premise is that, in markets characterised by strong network effects, data-driven advantages and high switching costs, gatekeeper platforms can occupy positions so entrenched that waiting years for an Article 102 case to run its course effectively cedes the market to them in the meantime.[3]
The Regulation imposes a set of ex-ante, largely self-executing obligations directly on companies that meet the gatekeeper definition. It regulates ten categories of “core platform service” (i.e. online intermediation services, search engines, social networks, video-sharing platforms, messaging services, operating systems, web browsers, virtual assistants, cloud computing and online advertising) and designates as a gatekeeper any undertaking that meets the qualitative test of Article 3(1): significant impact on the internal market, control of an important gateway between business users and consumers, and an entrenched and durable position, or the foreseeable emergence of one. Article 3(2) attaches quantitative thresholds that create a presumption of gatekeeper status, subject to rebuttal, while Article 3(8) allows the Commission to designate a company even where those thresholds are not met, following a dedicated market investigation.
The DMA sets out both obligations and prohibitions to be respected by the designated gatekeepers. As some may be open to broad interpretative approaches, the Commission may elaborate iterative clarifications. For these, the Commission can open a specification proceeding under Article 8(2) to define compliance in dialogue with the company before, or instead of, moving to a finding of infringement.
Enforcement sits exclusively with the Commission, unlike ordinary EU antitrust law, which is enforced in parallel by national competition authorities; this centralisation was itself designed to guarantee consistent, EU-wide application of rules that, being a Regulation rather than a Directive, apply directly in all Member States without national transposition. Penalties for non-compliance can reach 10% of a company’s total worldwide annual turnover, rising to 20% for repeat infringements, with periodic penalty payments available to compel compliance and, for systematic non-compliance, the possibility of behavioural or even structural remedies.
Having taken into consideration the legal background of the DMA, the two decisions of 16 July 2026 are not an isolated phenomenon but a case study on how the DMA is meant to function.
THE SPECIFICATION DECISIONS
The two specification proceedings were both opened on 27 January 2026 and ran in parallel, with the final decisions both concluding on 16 July. The decisions include binding measures.
The decisions are connected, as both are about whether Google’s control over a foundational layer, the Android operating system in one case, the unprocessed information on what people search for in the other, can be used to entrench its own position in the market that increasingly matters most, artificial intelligence, at the expense of everyone trying to compete with Gemini or with Search itself.
INTEROPERABILITY WITH GOOGLE ANDROID
The first decision concerns Article 6(7) of the DMA, which requires a gatekeeper to provide business users and third-party providers with free and effective interoperability with the hardware and software features of its operating system, provided that interoperability does not compromise security or the integrity of the device. Applied to Android, this obligation had, until now, produced little practical change: rival AI assistants competing with Google’s own Gemini could be installed on Android phones, but they lacked access to system-level features that Gemini enjoyed by default, such as being triggered by a wake word in the way “Hey Google” activates Google’s assistant, or being able to act on a user’s behalf inside other apps. The Commission found that roughly 60% of EU users on Android devices were, in practice, locked into a lesser experience with any assistant other than Google’s own.[4] The decision specifies that Google must give competing AI providers equivalent access: EU users should be able to trigger their assistant of choice by voice, delegate tasks such as booking a taxi, receive suggested replies inside messaging apps, or ask their assistant about a place they recently visited, which are all capabilities so far reserved for Gemini. The decision also builds in safeguards intended to preserve user privacy, device integrity and security while opening up access.
GOOGLE SEARCH DATA
The second decision concerns Article 6(11), which obliges a gatekeeper operating a search engine to give rival search providers access, on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, to anonymised ranking, query, click and view data that it generates from users’ interactions with its own search engine. Google had already made some data available by the March 2024 compliance deadline, but the Commission concluded that the implemented changes were not as effective as mandated by the DMA: the scope of data was too narrow and the anonymisation approach was contested. However, it was unclear whether AI chatbots with search functionality even qualified as eligible recipients. The new decision resolves each of those points. First, it confirms that AI chatbots offering search-like functionality are entitled to receive the data. Second, it requires Google, once the data is anonymised, to share broadly the same information it uses to optimise its own search results. Third, it lays down a multi-layered anonymisation methodology developed with internal and external privacy experts, designed to align with the draft joint guidelines the Commission and the European Data Protection Board are preparing on how the DMA and the GDPR interact.[5] Google retains the ability to assess, before sharing data with a specific recipient, whether doing so would pose a serious cybersecurity or data-protection risk, and the Commission has left itself room to revisit the anonymisation requirements as the market and independent evaluations develop. The decision also sets a formula for pricing the data and a transparent process for requesting access to it.
IMPORTANCE OF THE DECISIONS: A PATTERN OF ENFORCEMENT
This is not the first time that Google finds itself on the wrong side of an EU procedure over data access, self-preferencing or Android control. Three prior enforcement procedures are worth setting alongside the July 2026 decisions.
The first is the long antitrust history under ordinary competition law, rather than the DMA. The 2017 Google Shopping decision, which fined Google €2.42 billion for systematically favouring its own comparison-shopping service in search results, was upheld in full by the European Court of Justice in September 2024, closing a case that had run for the better part of a decade from opening to final judgment. The 2018 Android decision, which fined Google roughly €4.34 billion (later reduced to about €4.1 billion) for bundling Search and Chrome into Android licences and paying manufacturers to keep rival operating systems off their devices, faced the same sanctioning trend on 2 July 2026, when the Court of Justice dismissed Google’s final appeal and made the fine definitive. A third case, the 2019 AdSense decision fining Google €1.49 billion over exclusivity clauses that shut out rival search advertising brokers, took a different path: the General Court annulled it in September 2024, the Commission has appealed to the Court of Justice, and the matter remains pending. Most recently, in September 2025, the Commission fined Google €2.95 billion under ordinary antitrust rules for favouring its own ad exchange within the adtech supply chain.[6][7] Read together, these cases describe a single recurring concern: Google using control over a chokepoint, whether search results, Android licensing or the ad stack, to favour outcomes toward its own products.
The second trend is the DMA’s own enforcement record. The Commission opened its first non-compliance investigations under the Act in March 2024, a few weeks after the compliance deadline took effect, targeting Apple’s and Google’s steering rules and Google’s self-preferencing in Search under Article 6(5), among others.[8] On 19 March 2025, the Commission sent Google preliminary findings that its search results continued to give Google’s own vertical services, such as Google Shopping, Google Flights and Google Hotels, more favourable formatting and placement than rival comparison services, in a manner it considered incompatible with Article 6(5)’s non-discrimination requirement. That case has moved slowly by the DMA’s own fast-track standards[9] and, at the time of writing, a formal non-compliance decision, reportedly to include a substantial fine alongside a parallel finding on Google Play’s anti-steering rules, is expected imminently, though the Commission has not yet confirmed either the figure or the date. Whatever the outcome, it would follow the template set by the DMA’s first-ever sanctions, issued on 23 April 2025, when the Commission fined Apple €500 million for restricting app developers’ ability to steer users to purchase options outside the App Store, and fined Meta €200 million for its “consent-or-pay” advertising model. Those two decisions established that the Commission was prepared to use its fining powers early in the DMA’s life, not only its power to specify compliance.
The last trend regards the specification-proceeding mechanism used for the July 2026 decisions themselves. The Commission opened the interoperability and search-data proceedings on 27 January 2026 explicitly to “assist” Google in complying with obligations it had already been subject to for nearly two years, language that reflects the DMA’s stated preference for dialogue over immediate punishment. That six-month proceeding produced the binding measures now in force. It is a reminder that specification decisions and non-compliance fines are two different enforcement tracks running in parallel against the same company, over conduct that is, at bottom, the same recurring pattern: gatekeeping a chokepoint in ways that keep rivals a step behind.
The argument can be made that the Commission is working double-time to keep up with the changes pushed by the rapidly growing AI digital infrastructure. This pattern of enforcement, coupled with other groundbreaking efforts (see our previous article on the imposition of AI-related interim measures on Meta in June 2026[10]) show a clear strategized effort on behalf of the Commission to keep up, to regulate and to protect both the AI companies as well as the end consumer.
[1] Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Digital Markets Act), available under the followinglink.
[2] Summary of Commission Decision of 19 March 2025 relating to a decision pursuant to Article 8(2) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (Case DMA.100203 – Article 6(7) – Apple – iOS – SP – Features for Connected Physical Devices) (notified under document number C(2025) 3000), available under the following link.
[3] European Commission, the Digital Markets Act, available under the following link.
[4] European Commission: Commission provides guidance to Google for AI interoperability on Android and sharing of Google Search data under the Digital Markets Act, available under the following link.
[5] Ibid.
[6] This decision is currently being contested by Google.
[7] European Commission, “Commission fines Google €2.95 billion over abusive practices in online advertising technology,” Press release IP/25/1992, September 2025, available under the following link.
[8] Digital Markets Act (DMA) portal, “Commission finds Apple and Meta in breach of the Digital Markets Act,” 23 April 2025, available under the following link.
[9] The Act was designed to produce findings within roughly a year.
[10] INSERT LINK TO PREVIOUS META ARTICLE
