Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – The EU on Monday laid out measures it wants Google to take to open up its operating system to rival AI services, in a move slammed by the US tech giant.
“The proposed measures aim to ensure that competing AI services can effectively interact with applications on users’ Android devices and execute tasks accordingly, such as sending an email using the user’s preferred email app, ordering food or sharing a photo with friends,” the European Commission said. Under the EU’s flagship Digital Markets Act (DMA), the world’s biggest tech companies must open up to competition to give consumers more options and limit abuses linked to market dominance.
US President Donald Trump’s government has railed against the law and its sister content moderation law, the Digital Services Act, accusing Brussels of unfairly targeting US firms. Brussels said that the proposals for Google “will provide Android users across the EU with a wider choice of AI services.”
But Google hit back, saying that the “unwarranted intervention” risks “unnecessarily driving up costs while undermining critical privacy and security protections for European users.” The latest step by the EU represents part of its preliminary conclusions from a process launched in January. The procedure involving Google is not a formal investigation that could lead to fines.
But if Brussels is not satisfied with Google’s efforts, it can later conclude the company is not complying. And any DMA violations can lead to fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s total global turnover. Google is already the subject of several formal DMA probes, and was hit with a massive 2.95 billion euro fine in September 2025 in an EU competition case predating the digital law.
© 2024 AFP
