Two decisions, one gatekeeper
On July 16, 2026, the European Commission adopted two binding specification decisions against Alphabet under the Digital Markets Act — the most granular use yet of the DMA's power to tell a gatekeeper not just what to fix, but exactly how. Under Article 6(7), Google must open 11 defined Android features — grouped into invocation, context, in-app actions and resource access — to rival AI assistants, so a user can summon a competitor's assistant with a "Hey Google"-style hotword or let it act inside other apps on their behalf. Under Article 6(11), Google must share anonymised search ranking, query, click and view data with competing search engines and AI chatbots on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, starting January 2027, according to the Commission's own decision page. Most Android measures are due with the next major OS release, Android 18, and by August 1, 2027 at the latest; the hardest feature, concurrent hotword detection, gets until Android 19 in August 2028.
The case the Commission is entitled to make
The strongest argument for intervention here isn't abstract. Google controls the Android layer that mediates access to AI assistants on the large majority of the world's smartphones, and per reporting on the decision, it holds over 90% of EU general search share — a dominance position the Commission cites explicitly to justify the search-data order. When the underlying platform also happens to own the AI assistant (Gemini) that benefits from default access to hotwords, app actions and personal context, the on-ramp to the AI-assistant market runs through Google's private infrastructure whether rivals like it or not. The Commission's own account of the process backs this up: Google's first compliance proposal for search-data sharing reportedly stripped out 90–100% of unique queries before handing them to competitors, effectively neutering the obligation before it began. A specification decision that names 11 features and a data schema, rather than a vague duty to "interoperate," is a reasonable response to a gatekeeper that has already shown it will comply minimally with anything looser.
Where the remedy gets expensive
But precision cuts both ways. A regime that enumerates 11 Android features with staggered deadlines running to August 2028 is also a regime that requires the Commission to keep legislating by decision for years, feature by feature, OS release by OS release — a heavy administrative footprint for a five-person product team's worth of functionality. Google's own objection, voiced by President of Global Affairs Kent Walker and reported by ppc.land, that the rules "risk undermining vital privacy and security guardrails for millions of Europeans" by exposing private search behavior to unfamiliar companies, deserves more than a dismissal — the Commission itself has had to build a "multi-layered anonymisation" method and a cybersecurity vetting step into the order, an implicit concession that the privacy risk is real, not manufactured. And the beneficiaries of a FRAND data pipe built for scale are more likely to be Microsoft's Bing, OpenAI or other well-capitalized players than the small European challengers — Ecosia, Qwant — the DMA is nominally designed to help; a rising tide of shared data may lift the yachts before the dinghies.
The interoperability the Commission didn't order
That selectivity is exactly what the Electronic Frontier Foundation flagged when the Commission went the other way on a related question. In an April 2026 decision, the Commission declined to extend the DMA's interoperability mandate to social networking platforms, citing insufficient user demand and technical complexity. EFF called this a choice to "keep EU users locked up behind Big Tech's gates," arguing that demand for alternatives can't materialize until users see real interoperability progress, and that federated protocols like ActivityPub already prove the technical objection is overstated.
EFF has a point about inconsistency, but the two cases aren't identical. Sharing search-ranking data or letting a third-party assistant fire a hotword are bounded, API-shaped interventions with a defined data schema and a gatekeeper who already runs enterprise-grade data-sharing infrastructure. Full social-graph portability between Facebook and TikTok touches user-to-user content moderation, cross-platform harassment vectors and GDPR data-minimization questions that a single specification decision can't cleanly resolve. The Commission may simply be triaging by remedy-readiness rather than playing favorites — but if that's the reasoning, it should say so explicitly rather than leaving critics to infer a double standard from silence, as noted in dig.watch's coverage of the July decisions.
The transparency lesson worth keeping
Whatever one thinks of the substance, the mechanism is worth studying alongside the DSA's transparency-reporting regime. Where DSA Article 24/42 reports rely heavily on platforms self-disclosing aggregate content-moderation numbers, the DMA specification decisions publish a public compliance webpage, an eligibility-application process and a pricing formula that third parties can independently test against. That is a more auditable form of transparency than a self-reported PDF — and a model the DSA's own reporting regime, still criticized for opacity, could borrow.
The Commission has built a defensible, evidence-grounded remedy for a genuine chokepoint. It should now apply the same rigor — and the same willingness to explain its reasoning publicly — to the interoperability questions it has so far chosen to leave alone.