Picture your phone as a house. Right now, Google’s own apps have a key to every room. Everyone else has to ring the doorbell and hope someone answers. On July 16, 2026, European regulators told Google it has to hand out copies of that key, to Android, the software running six in ten phones in Europe, and to Google Search, which handles more than nine in ten European searches.
The order came from the European Commission, the EU’s competition watchdog, under a law called the Digital Markets Act. Passed in 2022, the DMA singles out a handful of “gatekeepers,” companies so big they control how everyone else reaches customers online, and forces them to play fairer. Google, Apple and Meta all made that list back in 2023.
This latest move has two parts. First, Android must open up to rival AI assistants, like ChatGPT or Claude, giving them the same backstage access Google’s own Gemini assistant enjoys, such as responding to a wake word, understanding what’s on your screen, and running quietly in the background. Eleven such features must be unlocked, mostly by August 2027.
Second, and more strikingly, Google must start sharing anonymised data from Google Search with rival search engines and AI chatbots, beginning January 2027. Think of it as sharing the recipe, not the ingredients. Not people’s actual searches, but scrubbed, aggregated patterns showing what people search for, click on, and find useful. That’s the raw material Google has spent 25 years refining to make its results so good. Regulators want competitors to have a shot at the same head start.
Why go this far? Because Brussels believes Google’s dominance has become nearly impossible to challenge without help. No matter how good a rival search engine or AI assistant is, it can’t out-improve a system built on decades of data it’s never been allowed to see.
Google isn’t happy. In a company statement, its top policy executive, Kent Walker, warned the ruling could expose “Europeans’ private searches… to unfamiliar companies” and threaten both business secrets and national security. Google is expected to appeal, though under EU rules, it has to start complying regardless while any appeal plays out.
The stakes for dragging its feet are enormous. Fines could reach up to 10% of Google’s entire global revenue, rising to 20% for repeat offences, plus daily penalties if it stalls. This isn’t Google’s first brush with Brussels, either. The company has already paid out more than 10 billion euro in EU fines since 2017 for various antitrust violations, and a separate, possibly record-breaking fine over Google favouring its own shopping and travel listings is reportedly in the pipeline.
Not everyone thinks this will work as intended. Critics point out that when Apple faced similar EU pressure, it simply held back some AI features from European iPhones rather than open them up, and something similar could happen here. There’s also irony in the timing. In the AI assistant race, Google is currently the underdog to ChatGPT, so forcing it to share its playbook may end up helping OpenAI and Microsoft’s Bing more than any scrappy European startup.
Still, for anyone watching how governments are trying to rein in “Big Tech,” this is a landmark moment. It’s one of the most direct attempts yet by regulators to reach inside a tech giant’s core products, its operating system and its search engine, and rewire how they work, rather than just fining the company after the fact.