Google hit with €890M EU Digital Markets Act fine, surpassing Alibaba's four-day-old record

The European Commission fined Google €890 million on Thursday under the Digital Markets Act, the EU's main law for policing the largest "gatekeeper" platforms, issuing the largest DMA penalty on record and toppling a mark that had belonged to Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba for roughly four days.

The DMA is a 2022-era EU regulation that names a small set of large platforms as "gatekeepers" and imposes specific do-and-don't obligations on them. Google was designated a gatekeeper across more than a dozen core platform services, including Search and Play, which is the legal hook the Commission used to act. A "gatekeeper" is the DMA's term for a platform the EU considers structurally unavoidable for businesses to reach European users, and once that label is attached, the obligations and the fines follow.

The fine splits into two pieces. The first, €460 million, is for self-preferencing inside Google Search. The Commission found that Google ranks its own comparison shopping, hotels, transport, and sports results above third-party equivalents, with enhanced visuals and top placement reserved for its own units. The second, €430 million, is for anti-steering rules on Google Play, where Google blocked app developers from freely pointing users toward alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels. The Commission also deemed the related steering fees and the charging period non-compliant. Both findings were laid out in the Commission's 23 July 2026 press release and the DMA portal decision page.

The penalty is the largest under the DMA to date, and the scale jump is unusually fast. The Register reported that Alibaba held the previous record by roughly €340 million, a position it occupied for only four days before the Google decision replaced it. Read narrowly, that is a record swap. Read across jurisdictions, it shows the EU escalating fines against the largest US and Chinese platforms in succession, rather than targeting any one country.

Read against Alphabet's books, though, the fine is small. €890 million works out to roughly 0.25% of Alphabet's $402 billion in annual revenue and under 1% of its $132 billion in net income. That is a number that earns a regulatory headline but does not move a quarterly earnings model. The deterrent value sits elsewhere: each successive decision resets expectations about what the Commission will accept, and it gives the regulator leverage on the next case rather than this one. Alongside the fine, the Commission ordered Google to bring its non-compliance to an end, and the compliance clock, not the cash, is the part that bites.

Google has rejected both findings. The company argues the remedies weaken its services and, on Play, that loosening the steering rules would compromise platform security. It has also proposed and is testing ranking changes for Search, which the Commission is monitoring. Those proposed changes, alongside any appeal Google files to the EU's General Court, are the immediate next beats to watch.

The harder watch item is AI. The Commission has opened a separate conversation with Google about how AI Overviews and AI Mode interact with the self-preferencing finding, and the same DMA obligations that produced Thursday's fine apply to those products once a service is on a gatekeeper's list. That makes the AI thread not a separate case but a continuation of the same case, with the next compliance ask likely to land in the same enforcement lane.

For now, the headline is the record. For the next quarter, the headline is the AI thread, the appeal clock, and whether the Commission's compliance demands on ranking and steering land before any court ruling.