Two Fines, One Theory of Harm
On 23 July 2026, the European Commission handed Google its first sanctions under the Digital Markets Act: €460 million for self-preferencing its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results in Google Search, and €430 million for restricting how app developers on Google Play can point users toward cheaper payment options elsewhere. The combined €890 million is not, on its own, a large number for a company Alphabet's size — it is roughly a day and a half of Alphabet's 2025 revenue. What matters is the theory of harm the Commission is testing: that a gatekeeper's design choices, not just its contracts, can constitute unlawful self-preferencing under Article 6(5) of the DMA (Commission press release, 23 July 2026).
The Search decision found that Google displays its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results "more prominently... including at the top of the search results page or by using enhanced visuals and filters," while comparable third-party services receive no equivalent placement (Digital Strategy press release). The Play Store decision found that the steering-related fees Google charges developers who direct users to outside payment channels, and the length of time those fees applied, "went beyond what is considered compliant" with the Article 5(4)/6(4) anti-steering obligations.
The Steelman
The Commission's underlying concern is not hypothetical. A search engine that occupies the default entry point for most of the open web has genuine power to determine which comparison-shopping site, hotel-booking service or transport app a user ever discovers — and self-preferencing lets a gatekeeper convert that position into share in adjacent markets it did not win on the merits. That is precisely the harm the European Commission's 2017 Google Shopping decision, upheld years later on appeal, was built around, and it is fair to note this is not Brussels relitigating an old grievance but applying a codified, ex-ante version of the same logic. On the app-store side, developers genuinely have paid steering fees on transactions Google's own systems never processed, a friction that a truly competitive distribution market would not tolerate. Regulators betting that structural rules beat case-by-case litigation have a real point: the original Shopping case took seven years from complaint to final fine.
Where the Remedy Gets Harder Than the Fine
The problem is that €890 million was the easy part. Google now has 60 days from the 23 July decision to change its conduct or face periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of Alphabet's average daily worldwide turnover — a number that compounds daily and dwarfs the initial fine within weeks (Commission decision; reported by Tech Policy Press). But "stop self-preferencing in search ranking" is not a bright-line rule like "stop charging this fee" — it requires the Commission to continuously judge whether a ranking algorithm change is genuine relevance-optimization or disguised favoritism. Google's Kent Walker, the company's president of global affairs, called the decision harmful to European businesses and consumers and said the company was evaluating an appeal, arguing that "regulation should improve products, not make them worse" (per Tech Policy Press's reporting). An appeal would not pause the compliance clock and would likely take two to three years to resolve at the EU General Court — leaving Google to redesign a live product against a moving compliance target while litigation runs in parallel.
This is the DMA's structural bind, visible now in its second full year of fines. In April 2025 the Commission issued its first-ever DMA sanctions — €500 million against Apple for anti-steering violations and €200 million against Meta for its "consent-or-pay" advertising model — both on the same 60-day compliance clock and both now under appeal (Noerr law firm summary). None of those remedies has yet been tested by a full compliance review; the Commission is stacking fresh gatekeeper cases before it has confirmed the earlier ones actually changed behavior rather than just changed the invoice.
Proportionality, Not Principle, Is the Fight
People of Internet's editorial position is not that self-preferencing should go unpoliced — a dominant search engine that quietly tilts rankings toward its own shopping unit is exactly the kind of foreclosure competition law exists to catch, and the €2.42 billion 2017 Google Shopping precedent shows this is a well-established, court-tested theory, not regulatory improvisation. The concern is calibration. A statute that lets the Commission define compliance after the fact, on pain of a 5% daily-turnover penalty, hands the regulator enormous discretion over product design with limited judicial check in real time — precisely because appeals don't toll the clock. That asymmetry pushes gatekeepers toward defensive over-compliance (stripping features that might attract scrutiny, even pro-consumer ones) rather than toward the narrow fix the violation actually calls for.
The more useful test of the DMA in 2026 isn't the size of the fines — it's whether the Commission's forthcoming compliance reviews of the Apple and Meta remedies, and eventually Google's, produce measurably more competition in comparison shopping and app payments, or just a documented paper trail of redesigns that quietly restore the same outcomes through different mechanics. Brussels should publish that evidence before reaching for the next fine.