A Screen That Disappears Exactly Where It Isn't Mandatory
On July 14, 2026, the Secretariat of Switzerland's Competition Commission (COMCO) announced a preliminary investigation into Google, after the company quietly removed the Android "choice screen" — the setup-time prompt letting new phone owners pick a default search engine — for users in Switzerland, while keeping it fully intact across the European Economic Area. The result, as COMCO's statement put it, is that "the Google search engine is imposed as the default on Swiss users, without a 'choice screen.'"
That timing is the whole story. The choice screen was never a Google-invented courtesy; it originated as a remedy in the European Commission's 2018 Android antitrust case and was later hard-coded into the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) as a binding gatekeeper obligation. Switzerland is neither an EU nor EEA member, so no equivalent statute compels Google to show it there. The moment a market sits outside the DMA's jurisdictional perimeter, the screen vanished from it — a clean natural experiment showing that Google's EEA compliance was jurisdictional, not a voluntary global user-protection norm, however that assumption may have been read in Bern.
Switzerland's Deliberate Choice: No Swiss DMA
This matters because Switzerland made an explicit, considered decision not to legislate a domestic Digital Markets Act. Its Cartel Act of 1995 (Kartellgesetz, SR 251) instead relies on Article 7's abuse-of-dominance test — an ex-post, case-by-case inquiry that requires evidence of actual anticompetitive effect, not a blanket ex-ante structural obligation imposed on any firm crossing a size threshold. COMCO's opening move here is a Vorabklärung — a preliminary inquiry, the lightest instrument in its toolkit, used to establish whether there's enough basis to open a formal investigation at all. If COMCO does eventually find an Article 7 violation, Article 49a of the same Act allows fines of up to 10% of the company's Swiss turnover over the preceding three years — a serious number, but one that only attaches after a proven abuse, not a presumed one.
The Steelman: Defaults Are Not Neutral
COMCO's underlying concern deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off as regulatory overreach. Behavioral economics has shown repeatedly that default settings shape outcomes disproportionately to the effort required to change them — most users never touch a phone's factory search default, however trivial the alternative technically is. COMCO's own statement frames the choice screen as a check against "lock-in caused by preset configurations," and notes the removal "could limit the visibility of search engines competing with Google" at exactly the moment users are most open to comparing options. Given that Statcounter puts Google's share of Swiss search traffic at roughly 82% as of June 2026 — far ahead of Bing's ~10% and DuckDuckGo's low single digits — a setup-screen nudge is one of the few moments genuine competitive visibility for rivals exists at all. That's a legitimate competition concern, not a manufactured one.
Why a Vorabklärung Is Still a Preliminary Step
But a preliminary inquiry is not a finding, and treating it as one would be premature. COMCO itself has said the process will likely take months before any decision on formal proceedings, let alone a violation finding. Unlike hardware-level exclusivity — the pre-installation and revenue-share deals at the heart of the European Commission's original 2018 Android case, whose €4.125 billion fine the EU Court of Justice finally upheld on July 2, 2026 in Case C-738/22 P — a missing setup screen is a single UI step in an ecosystem where installing a different search app or browser on Android remains a five-second download, not a locked-out option. The evidentiary bar for showing that this specific omission forecloses competition, rather than merely making switching one tap less convenient, is meaningfully higher than in a pre-installation exclusivity case, and COMCO will need to clear it with actual market data, not just architecture-of-choice theory.
The Better Test Than a Statute
What makes this case worth watching is precisely that Switzerland is trying to get a DMA-style consumer-choice outcome through general competition law rather than a bespoke gatekeeper statute. If COMCO's ex-post Article 7 process can compel Google to reinstate the screen (or extract another effective remedy) on ordinary abuse-of-dominance grounds, it will be a meaningful data point for jurisdictions weighing whether they need their own DMA at all, versus strengthening enforcement under existing law. A regulator that gets to the same result without pre-emptively re-engineering how every large platform must design its products is the more proportionate model — provided it can actually prove the abuse. For now, Google says it is cooperating; the burden sits with COMCO to show that removing one screen, in one market, crosses from product discretion into an unlawful restriction.