Regulating Big Tech: Will the EU Finally Rein in Google?
It's taken Google decades to build an empire in search, advertising, and digital services, shaping much of the web. For most businesses and customers, it's not possible to circumvent Google—it's everywhere online. As Google's influence grows, regulators are asking whether it promotes competition or just reinforces its monopoly. The new claims are a result of an EU investigation after rival companies claimed that Google's dominance of search and mobile platforms was stifling legitimate competition. In March 2025 the European Commission issued preliminary findings that Google was favoring its own products in search and blocking app developers from steering users to better deals outside Google Play.
At its core, the allegation is Google biases its search results to promote its own services, such as Google Flights, Google Hotels, and Google Shopping, over those of competitors being pushed further towards the bottom of the page. This isn't the first time—Google has been accused in this manner previously. Google was fined €2.42 billion by the EU in 2017 for prioritizing its shopping service over others. That ruling affirmed a clear precedent: Google dominates virtual marketplace access, and it exercises that control to maintain its dominance (Reuters, 2025). Another major issue is Google's Play Store restrictions. The EU's concern there is that Google stops developers from telling users about cheaper offers outside the Play Store, and charges them fees even when they do. That keeps transactions inside Google Play, where Google takes its cut (Financial Times, 2025).
Google's scale is a big part of the story, but it isn't only economies of scale. It's network effects. More searches give Google more data, more data makes its results better, and better results bring more searches. A competitor starting from zero can't get into that loop.
Search dominance: Google handles an estimated ~90% of European search traffic, according to the report. Competitors can't match the volume of data behind its results, and that gap is hard to close no matter how good their product is (Wall Street Journal, 2025).
Advertising muscle: Google operates one of the world's largest ad networks, making it a digital advertising giant, particularly in search ads.
App Store domination: Google takes up to a 30% commission on Play Store transactions, with a lower 15% rate on a developer's first $1 million in annual revenue and on subscriptions.
Google's side of this isn't empty. Integrating Flights or Shopping into search gives users faster answers, and plenty of people prefer that to clicking through to a comparison site. The hard question for regulators is separating self-preferencing that shuts out rivals from integration that people actually want. That line is genuinely difficult to draw, and it's why these cases take years.
If the EU wants the DMA to work, then it needs to do more than just fine companies. Whether or not enforcement will matter is still uncertain. Without better enforcement, Google will simply continue to look at fines as merely another cost of doing business.
A possible solution would be to require Google to unbundle its search and ad businesses in an attempt to prevent self-preferencing. This would create a clearer divide between how it ranks searches and how it profits from them. Another step would be forcing Google to allow genuine third-party app stores on Android without restrictive policies, giving developers and consumers more choices. Regulators could also require greater transparency in Google's search ranking system to prevent favoritism for its own offerings.
The bigger risk is that the rules stay vague. Ambiguous obligations give a company with Google's legal resources room to comply on paper, delay, and relitigate, while regulators play catch-up. If the DMA is going to work, the obligations have to be specific enough that compliance is something you can actually check. Otherwise the fines just become part of the budget.