A Fine That Followed the Script
On July 23, 2026, the European Commission fined Google €890 million (roughly $1 billion) in its first enforcement decision against the company under the Digital Markets Act. The fine split into two parts: €460 million for self-preferencing on Google Search — giving Google's own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results better placement than rivals' — and €430 million for restricting app developers on Google Play from directing users to cheaper purchase options outside the app (European Commission, DMA portal). Google now has 60 days to end both practices.
None of this was improvised. The DMA (Regulation (EU) 2022/1925) entered into force in November 2022 and its gatekeeper obligations became binding in 2024, after a formal designation process that named Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft as "gatekeepers" subject to a fixed rulebook (EUR-Lex, Regulation 2022/1925). Google's fine is also not the first: the Commission fined Apple €500 million in April 2025 for the same category of anti-steering violation on the App Store, then the largest DMA penalty on record (European Commission, DMA portal). Google's case is the continuation of an established enforcement track, not a new front opened for the occasion.
The Case for the Rule, Stated Fairly
The strongest argument for the DMA's self-preferencing ban is structural, not political. A company that operates both the platform millions of businesses depend on for visibility, and services that compete directly on that platform, has both the incentive and the means to tilt the field — ranking its own shopping comparisons or hotel listings above better or cheaper competitors regardless of merit. Ordinary antitrust law, built around proving harm case by case, moves too slowly against a dominant intermediary that can make quiet ranking adjustments no single competitor can litigate around in time. The DMA's answer is a fixed, pre-cleared rulebook — no self-preferencing, no blocking of alternative payment channels — enforced without having to relitigate market definition and dominance every time. That is a coherent regulatory theory, not a pretext.
Where the Fairness Argument Has Real Teeth
The more serious critique isn't that the DMA is illegitimate — it's that its "gatekeeper" thresholds, built on user counts and market capitalisation, happen to sweep in almost exclusively large American platforms. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation put it bluntly: the DMA rests on "reverse-engineered gatekeeper thresholds, which overwhelmingly capture U.S. firms," making EU enforcement look, to Washington, less like neutral competition policy and more like a tax on being American and successful (ITIF). That's a fair design critique the Commission has never adequately answered — no EU-headquartered firm has ever come close to gatekeeper thresholds, so the practical burden of the DMA falls almost entirely on one country's companies. A rule can be facially neutral and still function as trade policy in effect.
Trump's Response Skips the Process the Complaint Deserves
"This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it's not going to continue during the Trump Administration."
That's what President Trump posted on July 24, 2026, alongside a threat that the EU "will pay a very big price" and is not America's "PIGGYBANK" (Al Jazeera). The same day, he announced a Section 301 trade investigation that he said would likely produce a "substantial" tariff on the entire 27-member bloc, framing the DMA fine as the EU "ROBBING" American companies (CNBC).
The ITIF critique of the DMA's design is defensible. A blanket tariff threat in response to a specific, appealable competition ruling is a different thing entirely, and a worse one. Google can and likely will appeal this decision to the EU's General Court — the same venue where Apple's €500 million fine is currently being contested. That is the correct forum for arguing the DMA's thresholds are discriminatory or that the self-preferencing finding is factually wrong. Section 301, by contrast, is a blunt trade-remedy statute meant for addressing foreign practices that burden U.S. commerce — not a substitute appellate court for a sovereign regulator's antitrust decision. Using it here doesn't test whether the fine was correct; it just makes the fine more expensive to defend, for the EU and eventually for American consumers of the goods any retaliatory tariff would hit.
The Real Cost of Skipping the Argument
If Washington's actual objection is that DMA thresholds are effectively nationality-targeting, the fix is a negotiated or litigated argument about the rule's design — the kind ITIF itself favors, recommending "selective" pressure over blanket tariffs. Escalating every individual enforcement decision into a tariff threat instead does two things badly: it turns routine, appealable competition cases into recurring diplomatic crises, and it gives the Commission every incentive to keep enforcing exactly as before, since backing down now would look like capitulation to tariff threats rather than good regulatory practice. Proportionate regulation cuts both ways — Brussels should keep its thresholds defensible against the discrimination critique, and Washington should make that case through trade negotiation or WTO channels, not by treating a €890 million fine that followed its own published rulebook as an act of war.