Google Hit With $1 Billion EU Fine as US Antitrust Cases Mount
European regulators fined Google 890 million euros, or about $1 billion, on Thursday over business practices that federal judges in the U.S. have been ruling against for years.
Regulators in Brussels concluded that Google gave its own shopping, travel and translation services prime placement in search results while unfairly pushing competitors down the page and that Google’s Play store barred app developers from telling their own customers about cheaper ways to pay.
The penalty is the Silicon Valley giant’s first under the European Union’s 2022 Digital Markets Act, a sweeping law passed to address the power of the world’s biggest tech companies. Google has 60 days to comply, or it could face further penalties of up to 5% of its worldwide revenue.
In a blog post, Google & Alphabet President of Global Affairs Kent Walker characterized the European move as “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants.
“This implementation of the DMA continues to break everyday products,” Walker wrote. “To comply, we are having 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.”
The EU action echoes a series of antitrust rulings against Google in the United States, where — with Congress and state legislatures largely stalemated on tech regulation — challenges to Google’s dominance have played out in court instead.
In April 2025, a judge in Virginia found Google illegally monopolized the ad technology that places banner ads across much of the open web. That case is currently in the remedy and fallout phase following U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s liability ruling. It’s still unclear whether she will force a structural breakup or opt for behavioral restrictions.
In August 2024, a federal judge in Washington ruled Google illegally maintained a monopoly over internet search, and the following September, ordered it to stop signing exclusive default deals and to share search data with rivals. Both Google and the Justice Department are appealing at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Private lawsuits have also sought to address the company’s practices.
In August 2024, San Francisco-based Yelp sued Google over self-preferencing in local search results. Last month, a magistrate judge in San José held Yelp doesn’t have to prove Google is a monopoly. That case is pending in San José and is not scheduled to reach a jury until 2028.
In December of 2023, a San Francisco jury sided with Epic Games over Google’s grip on Android app distribution, the case behind this week’s changes to the Play Store. The resulting injunction from U.S. Judge James Donato began forcing the Play store to open to rival app stores in the U.S. on Wednesday, one day before Brussels levied a fine on Google.
Yelp welcomed the EU decision. David Segal, the company’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement that Google has “consistently chosen to unilaterally degrade its own user experience by removing functionality, which is the telltale mark of a monopolist.”
Tejas Narechania, a law professor at UC Berkeley who studies technology policy and platform regulation, said the European ruling is unlikely to have direct legal consequences for U.S. cases. Nonetheless, “Google lost, and I think that perception will affect [U.S.] juries going forward.
“From a technical legal perspective, the EU decision doesn’t set a precedent that Yelp or Epic could use in their lawsuits,” Narechania said. “But I think it contributes to a perception and atmosphere that some of these large companies are not always acting in consumers’ best interests and are sometimes acting unfairly.”
Still, Narechania questioned whether $1 billion registers at a company Google’s size, calling it roughly a day’s worth of profit and less than 1% of what Google will spend on AI infrastructure this year.