What to remember:

  • The EU is preparing a fine that could reach hundreds of millions of euros against Google, which would make it the largest under the DMA.
  • The central complaint: Google favors its own services to the detriment of competitors in its search results.
  • The European Commission says it favors compliance over sanctions, but does not want to wait indefinitely.
  • Google judges that the changes already made to comply with the DMA constitute “the largest downgrade in the history of the product”.

A decision expected before summer

According to the German business daily Handelsblatt, citing sources within the Commission, the decision is in the final stages of drafting and should be announced before the summer break. The amount envisaged would be in the hundreds of millions of euroswithout a precise figure having been officially confirmed.

This investigation was officially launched in March 2025. It concerns a practice well known to regulators: self-preferencingthat is to say the fact for Google to highlight its own services (Google Shopping, Google Maps, Google Flights, etc.) in its results pages, to the detriment of competitors.

The Commission wants compliance, not just a sanction

The spokesperson for the European Commission, Thomas Regnier, wanted to qualify the scope of this fine. In a statement sent to Reutershe indicated that the institution sought above all to get Google to actually comply with the DMA rulesrather than simply taking a financial penalty. He nevertheless made it clear that the Commission would not hesitate to take the next steps as soon as possible, including in the context of ongoing negotiations on long-term solutions.

Earlier this month, the Commission granted Google additional time to respond to its concerns, after an initial proposal from the company was deemed insufficient.

Google on the defensive

On the Mountain View side, the tone is one of protest. A Google spokesperson said the changes already made to its search engine to comply with the DMA represented “the largest downgrade in the history of the product”, creating, according to him, a lower quality experience for European users, to the benefit of “a few complainants acting in their own interests”.

Despite these criticisms, Google has said it wants to resolve the matter and continues to test adjustments in its results for EU users.

A context of repeated sanctions

This is not the first time that Google has found itself in the sights of European regulators. In 2017, the Commission had already imposed a fine of 2.7 billion euros to the company for illegally promoting its Google Shopping price comparison service. More recently, Google was fined 3.5 billion euros fine for its monopoly in programmatic advertising. If confirmed, the next sanction will therefore be part of a long series, but with the particularity of being the first of such magnitude under the DMA regime.

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