Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – The European Union on Thursday slapped Google with fines worth 890 million euros ($1 billion) in a move that risks escalating tensions with the United States. The EU fined the US giant 460 million euros for illegally favouring the company’s own services — for example, Google Flights or Google Hotels — over rivals in search results. The second fine, worth 430 million euros, was due to Google not allowing app developers to show consumers offers, free of charge, outside of its Google Play store, the European Commission said in a statement.
“After this decision, we want to make sure that there is more competition and also other companies are able to innovate,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said. A senior EU official noted that Google “still” continued to favour its own services, but the second fine covered a period between March 2024 to December 2025. The US titan accused the EU of dismantling safety protections on Google Play. “Regulation should improve products, not make them worse,” Google’s Kent Walker said in a statement.
The fines come just days before the first anniversary of a tariff deal struck between Washington and Brussels that eased trade frictions. President Donald Trump’s administration has previously accused Brussels of targeting US tech firms and threatened to retaliate against the EU with tariffs.
The fines are the biggest in total against one company under the competition law known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), following penalties of 200 million and 500 million euros imposed on Meta and Apple respectively in 2025. The DMA came into effect in 2024 and seeks to rein in what the EU views as Big Tech’s excesses in a bid to ensure fair competition in the digital realm.
The fines against Google have been anticipated for months as part of a probe that began in 2024, but Brussels has faced claims of delaying the move over fears of hurting ties with Washington. The EU can impose fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s total global turnover for breaching the DMA. A second EU official stated that the fines were worth 0.22 percent of Google’s turnover.
The fines could rise further if Google fails to comply within 60 days, the Commission warned, threatening the company with “periodic penalty payments.” “The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement. Google criticized Brussels, asserting that the EU forced the company to degrade products in the bloc. Google’s head of global affairs Kent Walker claimed that the company was being compelled to “strip away real-time Search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play.” “This isn’t fair competition,” he added.
Google is no stranger to EU fines. Between 2017 and 2019, the EU imposed a total of 8.2 billion euros in fines against the company. Additionally, Brussels levied a 2.95-billion-euro fine in a separate case under different antitrust rules in September last year, after which Trump threatened to retaliate against the EU. However, the EU appeared sanguine on Thursday regarding any potential US retaliation.
The EU’s duty is to “ensure that the regulation that is being adopted by our sovereign institutions is fully enforced and respected,” Ribera told reporters. She noted that there were similar cases in the United States where American authorities were “dealing with very similar approaches.” The EU and the United States agreed this year to address frictions linked to the bloc’s digital rules through talks, but those discussions have yet to commence.
Some 25 US lawmakers from Trump’s Republican party sent a letter on Tuesday urging the president to use tools against the EU’s “discriminatory” digital rules, such as trade investigations that could lead to higher levies. Virkkunen insisted that Europe would not waver in its enforcement. “We are very committed to our rules,” she told journalists.
© 2024 AFP
