A third strike, the same playbook
On 23 July 2026, the European Commission issued two non-compliance decisions against Google under the Digital Markets Act: a €460 million fine for self-preferencing its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results inside Google Search, and a €430 million fine for restricting how app developers can steer Google Play users toward cheaper purchase channels outside the store. Together, the €890 million penalty is the largest single DMA fine issued to date, and the Commission has ordered Google to end both practices within 60 days.
This is not Brussels' first DMA enforcement action. In April 2025 the Commission fined Apple €500 million for near-identical anti-steering restrictions and Meta €200 million over its "pay-or-consent" advertising model. Google is simply the third designated gatekeeper found in breach, and the violations — ranking your own products above rivals, charging fees on purchases the platform didn't facilitate — are the same categories of conduct the Commission flagged against Apple a year earlier.
The steelman: gatekeepers keep testing the same limits
The Commission's underlying complaint is not exotic or newly invented. It has spent nearly a decade litigating Google's tendency to elevate its own shopping and travel comparison tools above competitors' — the 2017 Google Shopping antitrust case turned on the same theory, and competitors have long argued that little changed on the ground until the DMA gave regulators a deadline-driven compliance tool instead of a multi-year abuse-of-dominance case. Charging developers ongoing "steering fees" on purchases completed entirely outside Google Play functionally replicates the toll structure Apple was fined for a year earlier. Regulators can reasonably read that pattern as evidence that gatekeepers treat DMA obligations as opening bids to negotiate down rather than as binding law, and that formal fines, not voluntary compliance pledges, are what actually move behavior. That is a fair account of why the Commission keeps escalating.
Where the calibration breaks down
But the substance of the finding and the size of the penalty are separate questions, and the second is where this decision undercuts its own stated logic. €890 million is a record for DMA enforcement, yet it remains far below the law's ceiling of up to 10% of a gatekeeper's global annual turnover — a gap analysts flagged after the Apple and Meta decisions, noting those fines "fall well below the DMA's 10% turnover threshold, potentially undercutting deterrence." If the Commission's own justification for pursuing Google now is that gatekeepers keep repeating conduct already punished once, a penalty schedule that keeps under-pricing each successive violation is not a fix for that problem — it is a continuation of it.
Meanwhile the remedy side moves on a much faster clock. Google has 60 days — until 21 September 2026 — to change how Search ranks its own products and how Play prices steering, or face periodic penalties of up to 5% of daily worldwide turnover. Google's Kent Walker argues compliance will require stripping "real-time Search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants" and loosening Play's security review process. Google has an obvious incentive to dramatize the cost of compliance as a negotiating tactic, and regulators are right to discount some of that framing on its face. But the sequencing problem underneath it is real: remedies take effect on a fixed 60-day timer regardless of whether Google ultimately appeals and prevails, while any challenge to the underlying finding runs through the EU courts on its own, far slower timeline. A company that disputes the finding is nonetheless required to redesign shipping products across an entire market before any court reviews whether the finding was correct.
The proportionate path
None of this argues against enforcing the DMA. Self-preferencing search results and metered steering fees on purchases made off-platform are exactly the gatekeeper conduct the law was written to stop, and Brussels is entitled to keep testing designated gatekeepers against that standard until they comply for good. But a regime that wants gatekeepers to treat obligations as binding, not negotiable, should size penalties closer to the statutory ceiling it already has, rather than setting a new nominal record that still reads, in relative terms, as a rounding error against Alphabet's balance sheet. And a regime that wants its remedies to be durable, rather than reversed years later after real product changes have already shipped, should build in more room for genuinely disputed findings to reach a court before mandating redesigns that are difficult to unwind. Proportionate regulation has to run in both directions at once: proportionate to the harm alleged, and proportionate to how settled the underlying finding actually is.