Many readers probably assume that antitrust penalties barely dent a giant company. Since 2017 alone, Google has been hit with fines running into the billions of euros, yet it has kept its market advantage, appealed for years, and put off final legal resolution.
The €890 million fine the European Commission issued on July 23, 2026 is small in amount, but it differs from those earlier cases in meaning. It is the first time Google has been penalized under a new regulatory framework, the DMA. Google has only 60 days to comply, and the compliance deadline in principle keeps running even while an appeal is pending.
How the €890 Million Splits Between Search and Google Play
On July 23, 2026, the European Commission found that Google had violated the DMA through self-preferencing in search results and restrictions on steering in Google Play, and imposed a total fine of €890 million (about ¥165.8 billion at an EUR/JPY rate of 186.33). The breakdown is €460 million for self-preferencing in search (a violation of DMA Article 6(5)) and €430 million for the steering restrictions on Google Play (a violation of Article 5(4)), a nearly even split. Article 6(5) prohibits Google from giving preferential treatment to its own services in search results, while Article 5(4) guarantees developers the right to direct users from within an app to alternative payment options, such as their own websites. The search self-preferencing issue essentially overlaps with the one at stake in the 2017 Shopping case, so the EU is pursuing the same problem nine years later with a new tool, the DMA.
The non-compliance investigation began in March 2024, and preliminary findings were communicated in 2025. The fine covers the self-preferencing and steering violations confirmed during that investigation period. As of June 30, 2026, Google introduced a new Play Store fee structure for the US, EEA, and UK, adding a new 10% service fee on auto-renewing subscriptions. (If Google Play's billing system is used, a 5% payment processing fee is added on top; it is not added for alternative billing or transactions through external links.) The Commission described the new fee structure as "good progress toward compliance," but said it would assess it again based on how it operates going forward.
Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, said: "Google has failed to achieve effective DMA compliance. Good products should succeed because they are better, not because they are owned by the company that runs the search engine." Those who stand to benefit from the remedy are comparison search services other than Google's, travel search sites, and providers of alternative payment options. If Google changes its practice of making its own services prominent through top placement and highlighting on its search results page, these businesses will move closer to competing for ranking on equal terms.
This is Google's first DMA penalty and the highest fine against a single company in the DMA's history. In April 2025, Apple was fined €500 million and Meta €200 million, making Google the third company to be penalized. The DMA took effect in 2022 and began to apply in May 2023, and Google was designated a "gatekeeper" in September of that year across multiple areas including search, operating systems, and app stores.
How the DMA Changed the Speed of Enforcement
Under traditional EU competition law, the Commission has had to prove, case by case, that a company abused a dominant market position, and the road from finding to final ruling has taken years. Indeed, in conventional cases such as Shopping and Android, Google was able to fight on to the Court of Justice of the European Union even after the Commission's decision, and final resolution took seven to eight years. The DMA, by contrast, designates platform companies above a certain size in advance as "gatekeepers" and sets out obligations in law beforehand, such as the ban on self-preferencing and the ban on restricting steering to alternative payments. Because the Commission does not need to prove abuse case by case, it can move to penalties faster once non-compliance is confirmed.
In this Google case, the entire process, from the March 2024 start of the investigation through the 2025 preliminary findings to the July 2026 penalty decision, was completed in a little over two years. Google has just 60 days to comply, and although it can appeal the decision, the deadline for meeting the compliance obligation proceeds independently of the appeal unless a court separately grants a stay of enforcement. Much of the seven to eight years the Shopping and Android cases took to become final was spent not on regulatory effectiveness itself but on proving in court whether a violation had occurred. By setting obligations in advance in law, the DMA removes that burden of proof, and that speeds up the path from opening a case to imposing a penalty.
If improvement is not recognized by the deadline, the Commission has the power to impose periodic penalty payments. These are cumulative, capped at "5% of average daily worldwide turnover," so rather than a lump sum assessed monthly or annually, the daily burden builds up the longer compliance is delayed.
Shopping, Android, AdSense: Nine Years of Conflict
The conflict over Google's self-preferencing goes back to the 2017 comparison shopping case. That year, the Commission fined Google €2.424 billion for favoring its own comparison shopping service in search results, and the decision became final on September 10, 2024, when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) dismissed the final appeal. That works out to seven years from decision to finality.
In 2018, anticompetitive contractual practices around Android came under scrutiny, and the fine, initially €4.34 billion, was reduced to €4.125 billion after the challenge. This case also followed a long court battle, and the final appeal was dismissed and the matter became final on July 2, 2026, just three weeks before the DMA fine. For the eight years until that finding became final, Google kept fighting while retaining its market advantage.
Meanwhile, the 2019 AdSense case (€1.49 billion) was a penalty imposed because Google excluded competitors through exclusive advertising intermediation contracts, but on September 18, 2024, the EU General Court annulled it, finding deficiencies in the reasoning of the finding. However, the Commission appealed that ruling in December of the same year, and the case is pending before the CJEU, so Google's win is not final. In addition, on September 5, 2025, Google was hit with a €2.95 billion fine, among the largest ever against a single company, for favoring its own ad exchange in its ad intermediation system, and Google appealed that decision in November 2025. The finalized Shopping and Android cases alone total €6.549 billion, and adding the pending Adtech case (€2.95 billion) and the current DMA fine (€890 million) brings the provisional total to about €10.39 billion. Over the nine years from 2017 to 2026, at least five major cases have accumulated between Google and the EU, but only two, Shopping and Android, are finally resolved; the AdSense case, the Adtech case, and the current DMA fine are all either under appeal or being considered for appeal.
A Fine That Doesn't Reach One Day of Revenue
An antitrust penalty should, in principle, exceed the profit gained from the violation and function as a deterrent. By that yardstick, €890 million is disappointingly small. Converted at the EUR/USD rate of 1.1418 on the day of the decision, the fine is about $1.02 billion, and at an EUR/JPY rate of 186.33 about ¥165.8 billion. That falls short of the roughly $1.10 billion in daily revenue obtained by dividing Alphabet's full-year 2025 revenue of about $402.8 billion ($402.836 billion), as shown in its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), by 365 days.
As a ratio, $1.02 billion is about 92% of one day's revenue, or roughly 22 hours' worth. The breakdown of €460 million for search self-preferencing and €430 million for the Google Play steering restrictions is each, taken alone, less than half a day's revenue. The cumulative DMA fines on Google, Apple, and Meta also come to just €1.59 billion (Apple's €500 million, Meta's €200 million, and Google's €890 million), which even combined for the three companies falls short of the €2.424 billion fine in Google's 2017 Shopping case alone.
Measured against annual revenue of about $402.8 billion, the $1.02 billion fine is only about 0.25%. A penalty that is supposed to serve as a deterrent falls within an amount that does not affect day-to-day business operations.
The 60-Day Deadline, AI Overviews, and the Impact on Japan
Google's deadline for compliance is 60 days from the decision, which by simple calculation falls around September 21, 2026. If sufficient remedies are not confirmed within the deadline, the Commission has the power to proceed to periodic penalty payments. Google said it is "reviewing the decision and considering an appeal," and Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Alphabet, pushed back, saying, "Regulation should improve products, not make them worse."
The decision states that the Commission is "continuing dialogue" with Google on how the Article 6(5) ban on self-preferencing applies to AI Overviews and AI Mode in search. As generative AI reshapes search, the Commission itself has thus hinted that its next enforcement target could extend to AI features. If AI Overviews are covered, how Google presents AI answers in search will itself become the next regulatory issue.
A similar regulatory philosophy is spreading to Japan. Under the Mobile Software Competition Act, fully in force from December 18, 2025, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) has already designated Google LLC as a regulated entity in areas such as search, OS, app stores, and browsers. The law's full enforcement came about seven months before this DMA penalty, and the same structure the EU's DMA addressed in search and Play self-preferencing is already under watch in Japan.
What Google must achieve within 60 days depends on whether it touches the ranking of the search results page itself. If the Commission recognizes this as effective compliance, periodic penalty payments will be avoided; if not, the daily burden will keep building. The effectiveness of this DMA penalty rests less on the size of the €890 million lump sum than on what Google can fix in these 60 days.