Google facing new EU charges over breaches of Digital Markets Act
Changes to Google’s search engine results fails to assuage either EU regulators or rivals
EU regulators are likely to argue that Google has not gone far enough to address concerns of its rivals.
Google is facing new charges from the European Union’s antitrust regulators over continued breaches to the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). It will argue this week that the changes the company made last year to the way its search engine operates and presents results in the EU don’t go far enough and has failed to address the complaints of its rivals.
Regulators have long argued that Google’s search results are biased and favour its own services, such as Google Shopping and Google Hotels over non-Google rivals. Google, however, claims that the changes it has already been required to make have benefited major vendors over smaller independents.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in November 2022, establishes a set of criteria to identify digital ‘gatekeepers’, which are expected to comply with an elevated set of rules to prevent them from shutting out rivals. These gatekeepers, which include Google in search, have a number of obligations they are expected to comply with, as well as certain prohibitions.
Newswire Reuters cites not one, but three anonymous insiders' sources with, it claims, knowledge of the issue who say that the European Commission remains dissatisfied. As a result, the Commission is likely to bring new charges against the company.
Failure to comply with the DMA entails fines up to 10 per cent of global annual revenue. With revenues of $350 billion in the year to the end of 2024, that could add up to a fine of $35 billion for Google.
Such a punishment would almost certainly attract the attention of President Trump. Although he has had a chequered history with the tech giants, he has taken an ‘America first’ attitude to economic matters since his return to the White House in January 2025.
The European Union is also investigating Facebook owner Meta and Apple in separate investigations under the DMA, while Apple has made its own complaints about Meta, arguing that it has weaponised the Act to acquire data about interoperability for commercial purposes.
Back in November 2024, the last time Google provided on-the-record comment on the matter, it admitted that the introduction of the Act had forced the company to make “substantial changes to the services Google can provide in Europe”, implying that the company had, indeed, discriminated against non-Google services in terms of the results it returns.
“While many of these changes have benefited large online travel aggregators and comparison sites, there's a different set of businesses that are unfortunately losing traffic as a result: it's now harder for airlines, hotel operators, and small retailers to reach customers. They have reported that free direct booking clicks are down as much as 30 per cent since we implemented our original changes,” argued Oliver Bethel, director of EMEA Competition at Google.
The company made more than 20 modifications to Google Search and removed a number of features. “And yet comparison sites are insisting that our changes need to go even further,” added Bethel.
He told Reuters that the company is working with the European Commission to find a “balanced solution” to the issue.
It’s far from the first run-in with that Google has had with EU regulators. Indeed, back in early 2019, the level of fines paid by Google to the EU even outweighed its taxes.