Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – The European Union on Thursday slapped Google with fines worth 890 million euros ($1 billion) in a move that risks escalating tensions with the United States. The EU fined the US giant 460 million euros for illegally favoring the company’s own services — for example, Google Flights or Google Hotels — over rivals in search results. The second fine, worth 430 million euros, was because Google did not allow app developers to show consumers offers free of charge outside of its Google Play store, the European Commission said in a statement.
“After this decision, we want to make sure that there is more competition and also other companies are able to innovate,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said. A senior EU official stated that Google “still” continued to favor its own services, but the second fine covered a period between March 2024 to December 2025. The US titan accused the EU of dismantling safety protections on Google Play. “Regulation should improve products, not make them worse,” Google’s Kent Walker said in a statement.
The fines come just days before the first anniversary of a tariff deal struck between Washington and Brussels that eased trade frictions. President Donald Trump’s administration has previously accused Brussels of targeting US tech firms and threatened to retaliate against the EU with tariffs.
The fines are the biggest in total against one company under the competition law known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), after the EU slapped penalties of 200 million and 500 million euros against Meta and Apple respectively in 2025. The DMA came into effect in 2024 and seeks to rein in what the EU views as Big Tech’s excesses in a bid to ensure fair competition in the digital realm.
The fines against Google have been expected for months as part of a probe that began in 2024, but Brussels has faced claims of delaying the move over fears of hurting ties with Washington. The EU can impose fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s total global turnover for breaching the DMA. A second EU official noted that the fines were worth 0.22 percent of Google’s turnover. The fines could rise further if Google fails to comply within 60 days, the Commission said, threatening it with “periodic penalty payments.”
“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” EU competition chief Teresa Ribera stated. Google hit out at Brussels, saying the EU forced the company to degrade products in the bloc. Google’s head of global affairs, Kent Walker, said the company was being forced to “strip away real-time search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play.” “This isn’t fair competition,” he added.
Google is no stranger to EU fines. Between 2017 and 2019, the EU hit the company with fines worth a total of 8.2 billion euros. Brussels imposed a 2.95-billion-euro fine in a separate case under different antitrust rules in September last year, after which Trump threatened to retaliate against the EU.
The EU, however, appeared sanguine on Thursday about any US retaliation. The EU’s duty is to “ensure that the regulation that is being adopted by our sovereign institutions is fully enforced and respected,” Ribera told reporters. She mentioned that there were similar cases in the United States and American authorities were “dealing with very similar approaches.”
The EU and the United States agreed this year to address frictions linked to the bloc’s digital rules through talks, but they have yet to begin. Some 25 US lawmakers belonging to Trump’s Republican party, in a letter on Tuesday, urged the president to use tools against the EU’s “discriminatory” digital rules such as trade investigations that could lead to higher levies. Virkkunen insisted Europe would not waiver in enforcement: “We are very committed to our rules,” she told journalists.
© 2024 AFP
