Google fined €890M for DMA violations in Search and the Play Store

The European Commission has fined Alphabet, Google's parent company, €890M (about $1 billion) for two separate breaches of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The decision comes more than two years after the investigation began, and following a preliminary finding issued in March 2025.

Two violations

The first fine — €460M — is for Google favoring its own Shopping, Hotels, and Flights services in search results. The second, €430M, concerns Play Store rules that prevented developers from freely steering users toward alternative, potentially cheaper payment systems.

The company has been given 60 days to change its policies, or it will face periodic penalty payments. In search, Google will be required to treat third-party services “fairly and without discrimination,” and to let Android developers freely promote their offers both inside the Play Store and beyond it.

Google's response

The company had already made changes to search in an attempt to comply: it removed the Google Flights widget for users in the EU and reworked its results to give third-party aggregator sites greater visibility. Yet in May, in a comment to Reuters, Google called these tweaks “the biggest product degradation in its history,” creating “a second-rate experience for Europeans to appease a few interested complainants.” Later in May, the European Commission extended the deadline, deeming the company's earlier proposal “simply not strong enough.”

On the Play Store, Google has repeatedly objected, arguing that opening up app distribution on Android threatens user security and hampers efforts to protect them from fraud and malicious links. Nevertheless, after consultations with the Commission, the company revised its fees and restrictions for developers — steps that Brussels called “good progress toward compliance.”

Context

This is not the first penalty of its kind: back in 2017, Google was already fined €2.42B for illegally giving its price comparison service an advantage. The maximum fine under the DMA is 10% of global annual revenue — in Google's case, on the order of $40 billion, given revenue of $400 billion in 2025. In parallel, pressure on the Play Store's policies is mounting in the US as well, following the lawsuit won by Epic Games.

“The best products should win because they are better, not because they belong to the company that runs the search engine,” said Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera.

Source: The Verge