EU Fines Google €890 Million Under DMA, Orders Search Overhaul in 60 Days

The European Commission on July 24 levied the first financial penalties ever issued under the Digital Markets Act, slapping Google with two fines totaling €890 million ($1 billion) — one for systematically favoring its own services in Search results, and a second for blocking app developers from steering users toward purchases outside the Play Store. The ruling, the culmination of an investigation that has been building since the DMA took effect in 2023, gives Google 60 days to overhaul how it presents search results before periodic daily penalties kick in.

The Two Fines

The European Commission identified two distinct violations of the DMA, each carrying its own penalty:

€460 million — Search self-preferencing: Google was found to have violated Article 6(5) of the DMA by systematically promoting its own specialized search services — including Google Shopping, Google Hotels, Google Flights, and local maps — over those of third-party competitors in organic search results. The commission found that Google’s presentation of these “rich results” units gave its own properties a structural advantage that rivals could not replicate regardless of the quality of their services.

€430 million — Play Store anti-steering: Google was found to have violated provisions requiring that app developers be free to direct consumers to external channels for purchases. The commission determined that Google’s terms of service effectively barred app developers from informing users that they could purchase services or subscriptions through a developer’s own website at potentially lower prices — a restriction that kept both revenue and user relationships inside Google’s ecosystem.

Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, who leads the Commission’s digital portfolio, stated: “We will not hesitate to use our tools to safeguard business and innovation opportunities opened up by the DMA.”

What Google Must Now Do

The 60-day compliance deadline attached to the search fine is the most operationally consequential element of the ruling. Google must cease self-preferencing in search results and ensure that third-party services receive fair display treatment without structural advantages flowing to Google’s own properties. What this means in practice is a redesign of how Google Search surfaces results in high-commercial-value categories like travel, hotel booking, local services, and e-commerce — categories where Google’s own verticals currently dominate the results page.

For the Play Store violation, Google must allow app developers to freely communicate with users — both within and outside the app store — about pricing, alternatives, and direct purchase options.

If Google fails to comply within 60 days, the Commission can impose periodic daily penalties — typically calculated as a percentage of global daily revenue. At Google’s current revenue run rate, even a modest daily percentage fine would quickly exceed the €890 million penalty already imposed.

Google indicated it plans to implement changes to how it presents shopping ads, its own services, and content-related offerings. The company notably avoided the word “comply” in its public statement, describing its intentions as “constructive engagement” with the Commission — language that suggests the exact scope of required changes remains under negotiation.

The Broader DMA Enforcement Picture

The Google fines arrive at a pivotal moment in the DMA’s enforcement history. The law, which formally designated the largest tech platforms as “gatekeepers” subject to binding competition obligations, has been in force since March 2024. But critics — including many of the rival companies that lobbied for the legislation — argued that the Commission had been slow to use its financial sanction powers.

Today’s action ends that wait. It also arrives less than two weeks after a separate DMA decision in which the Commission ordered Google to open 11 Android features to competing AI assistants and share anonymized search data with rivals — structural remedies without a financial penalty component. Together, the two rulings represent the most consequential regulatory intervention in Google’s European operations since the EU’s 2018 Android antitrust fine.

Unlike the older antitrust cases, the DMA operates on a different legal theory: it does not require the Commission to prove harm to competition in a specific market. Instead, it imposes ex-ante behavioral obligations on gatekeepers — requirements that must be met regardless of whether a particular act demonstrably harmed rivals. This framework makes enforcement faster and, in theory, more predictable than traditional antitrust proceedings.

What It Means for Google

For Alphabet, the €890 million fine is not financially material. Google generates roughly €400 million in daily global revenue — meaning today’s fine represents slightly more than two days of earnings. The reputational and operational consequences, however, are considerably larger.

The 60-day compliance deadline creates genuine engineering and business urgency. Google’s search product, at the scale at which it operates, is not easily redesigned. Changes to how rich results are displayed affect billions of daily queries, alter the traffic economics for thousands of advertisers and content publishers, and risk cascading side effects across Google’s interconnected ad ecosystem. Doing this in 60 days under regulatory scrutiny — while Alphabet is simultaneously managing record capex commitments, Gemini 4 pretraining, and investor pressure on margins — is a substantial operational challenge.

There is also the precedent-setting dimension. This is the DMA’s financial enforcement premiere. The Commission has pending DMA proceedings against Apple (regarding the App Store and browser defaults), Meta (regarding data interoperability), and Amazon (regarding marketplace practices). The message embedded in the Google decision is that investigations will eventually produce financial penalties — and that the Commission is prepared to attach operational compliance deadlines rather than simply collecting fines and moving on.

For the tech industry broadly, the DMA has now demonstrated that it has teeth. How sharp those teeth prove to be will depend on whether Google’s 60-day compliance effort satisfies the Commission — and what happens in the coming months to the other pending proceedings.