Brussels hands Google its first ever DMA penalty, and within hours President Trump answers with a Truth Social broadside and a new trade investigation, reviving a fight that has already touched Apple, Meta and Amazon.
The European Commission fined Google €890 million, just over one billion dollars, on Thursday for breaching the Digital Markets Act, marking the first time the search giant has been penalized under the sweeping law designed to police the conduct of the continent’s largest online gatekeepers. The decision arrived in two parts. Regulators issued a €460 million fine for what they called self preferencing in Google Search, and a separate €430 million fine for restricting how app developers direct users toward alternative purchase channels on Google Play.
At the center of the search finding is a familiar complaint dressed up in new legal clothing. The Commission said Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, among them shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, placing them at the top of the page and presenting them with richer visuals and filtering than the offerings of rival businesses. On the Play Store side, regulators found that Google prevents app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers and concluding contracts with users through distribution channels of their choice, including third party app stores. Google has been given 60 days to change how both systems work, and the Commission also ordered a broader overhaul of how the company ranks competitors in search results.
Google was designated a gatekeeper under the DMA in September 2023, and this particular investigation into its compliance opened in March 2024. The company has argued that reworking search rankings could degrade the experience for European users and hurt travel businesses that depend on Google for bookings, while changes to the Play Store, it says, would expose users to greater security risk by sending them to unvetted third party sites.
What makes Thursday’s fine notable is not really its size. One billion dollars is a rounding error against Alphabet’s balance sheet. What makes it notable is the company it now keeps. Google was designated a gatekeeper alongside Apple, Meta and Amazon under the same law, and all three of those companies have already been fined or sanctioned by Brussels in the past two years. Apple and Meta were penalized under the DMA specifically in April of last year. Amazon, too, has faced its own EU enforcement actions over the past several years tied to marketplace and data practices. Google itself is no stranger to European regulators either. This is now the fifth or sixth time the company has been sanctioned for anti-competitive conduct in the bloc, following a separate €2.9 billion fine last September over its advertising technology business, and Google recently lost its final appeal against a €4.1 billion antitrust fine tied to Android, after the European Court of Justice dismissed the challenge earlier this month.
The fine had barely finished circulating in Brussels before it detonated in Washington. President Trump took to Truth Social on Friday evening with a lengthy post accusing the EU of treating the United States like its own piggy bank. He tallied up the bloc’s recent penalties against American technology firms in a single breath, citing a 15 billion dollar fine against Apple, three billion against Meta, and 2.5 billion against Amazon, before turning to Google. “We have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another one billion dollars, without explanation,” Trump wrote, adding that the latest penalty brings Google’s cumulative EU fines to more than 18 billion dollars.
Trump did not stop at criticism. He announced that the United States would immediately open a Section 301 investigation, invoking the same provision of the Trade Act of 1974 that his administration has used this year to justify tariffs on more than 80 countries, this time aimed at what he called the practice of robbing American companies and, in turn, the American taxpayer. “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,” he wrote, warning that the European Union would pay a very big price and insisting the United States is not a piggybank for Europe, nor will it allow itself to become one.
The Commission, for its part, has stood by the substance of the ruling. Officials said the fines stem directly from Google’s alleged noncompliance with the Digital Markets Act, not from any broader animus toward American firms, and that the Commission continues to engage with Google to ensure compliance with its decisions and with the DMA more generally. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer had already weighed in earlier in the week, arguing that the EU’s recent actions under the DMA undermine constructive dialogue and pose a real risk to transatlantic trade stability, a sign that this dispute was brewing in Washington well before Trump’s evening post made it public.
Markets, notably, did not treat the fine as the day’s biggest Alphabet story. Shares dipped modestly in premarket trading, though analysts attributed most of that movement to investor unease over rising AI infrastructure spending disclosed in the company’s earnings report earlier in the week, rather than to the DMA penalty itself. That may be the most revealing detail in the entire episode. In the boardroom, a billion dollar fine barely registers. In the White House, it has become the latest flashpoint in a trade relationship that shows no sign of cooling, and every sign of becoming one of the defining fights of the year ahead.
