Tough week for Google! The company took heat in every direction from losing multi-billion-dollar lawsuits to having its search and mobile operating system monopoly challenged. Here’s a recap of what went down last week in the world of Google.
1) Google lost its final appeal against a €4.1B EU antitrust fine over its Android operating system.
The EU’s Court of Justice dismissed the company’s last challenge, leaving no further route to contest the fine. Regulators had previously ruled that Google shut out search competitors by making Android licenses conditional on phone makers like Samsung and LG bundling Google Search, Chrome, and the Play Store onto their devices. Google appealed multiple times, but this was its last available attempt. The ruling closes one of the last major cases from the EU’s first wave of Big Tech antitrust enforcement, which has since shifted toward ongoing gatekeeper obligations under the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act rather than one-off fines.
2) Google was ordered to pay PriceRunner nearly $2B in damages for favoring its own comparison-shopping services.
A Swedish court ordered Google to pay Klarna’s price-comparison subsidiary PriceRunner nearly $2B in damages, finding that Google favored its own comparison-shopping service over competitors. The ruling ties back to 2017 when the European Commission fined Google €2.4B for abusing its search dominance, which set off a wave of follow-on lawsuits. Judge Linda Kullberg called the award undoubtedly the largest ever in a Swedish competition case, though it covers harm across Sweden, Denmark, and the UK. Google said it disagrees and is weighing its legal options, with an appeal likely on the horizon. The roughly $1.97B figure equals about 25% of Klarna’s market capitalization, so it’d be a big win for the company, potentially funding a lot of BNPL loans!
3) The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority wants to loosen Apple and Google’s collective monopoly on mobile platforms.
The CMA is challenging what it calls the “effective duopoly” that the two companies hold over mobile platforms, considering rules that would let developers steer users to outside websites to make purchases and bypass app-store commissions of up to 30%. The regulator argues that consumers and app owners are being let down by restrictions on spending outside the two stores, which run on at least 90% of UK mobile devices, and pointed to Spotify forcing users to subscribe via desktop to dodge Apple’s fees.
The proposed changes would still let Apple and Google charge fees on steering users toward external payment systems that are “fair, reasonable, and lower than current app store charges.” Google says it already complied by rolling out its own steering fees last week. The open question is whether those fees are low enough to give developers a real escape from the 30% commission, or just reproduce it under a new name.
Personally, I think it’s insane that an OPERATING SYSTEM can charge fees in this manner at all! Can you imagine if Windows charged Adobe a 30% commission for subscribing to its Creative Suite on a Windows laptop? What the fuck is wrong with the mobile operating ecosystem and how did we let it get this bad? Things need to change immediately.
4) The European Commission plans to force Google to share certain data with EU competitors.
The rules, which could come as early as this month, could see Google forced to share its anonymized search data (queries, rankings, and click rates) with rival search engines and AI chatbots, and to open up Android so competing AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can access the same system-level features it reserves for Gemini. (The first is ridiculous to me. The latter is fair.)
Google warns that the regulations could create serious security and privacy risks, with VP of security engineering Heather Adkins telling Wired the changes could drive a significant rise in EU fraud within weeks of taking effect. The company argues that data anonymization is hard and that its own teams have re-identified such data in as little as two hours through linkage attacks, making smaller EU firms holding it a target. The Commission expects a binding decision on July 27 under the Digital Markets Act.
Like I said… tough week for Google! Something tells me my YouTube Premium is about to get more expensive…
