Today the European Commission fined Google €890 million for breaking the Digital Markets Act, the law the bloc wrote to pry open its largest online platforms.
€460 million was for self-preferencing in search: the Commission concluded that Google had given its own shopping, hotel, and travel results the prominent placement and the richer display that rival services could not get.
The other €430 million was for the rules Google Play imposes on the developers who sell through it, rules that kept them from telling their own customers about cheaper offers available elsewhere while charging a steering fee above what the law allows.
The Commission ordered Google to stop and to rank outside services on the same terms as its own.
The reaction from Washington arrived before the fine did. Days earlier, twenty-five Republican members of Congress, seven of them on the House trade subcommittee and one its chairman, wrote to President Trump urging him to treat European enforcement as an act of aggression against American business, a tool, they said, of “economic extraction and regulatory coercion.”
They asked him to reach for Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the statute that lets Washington answer unfair practices with tariffs, and reminded the bloc that “the EU’s access to the U.S. market is not guaranteed.”
The lawmakers also caught the Commission in an awkward inconsistency: Apple, Meta, and Amazon wear the gatekeeper label that pulls them under the law, while the Chinese marketplaces Temu and AliExpress, which reach just as far into European pockets, so far don’t.
The timing sharpened the suspicion, the fine landing hours before a batch of the President’s global tariffs was due to expire. Between the inconsistency and the timing, the charge of persecution has something under it. And yet the conduct Europe fined is the conduct American courts have already condemned, in cases brought by an American company, tried before American judges and an American jury, with no connection to Brussels.
Apple spent the past two years losing to Epic Games in a federal courtroom in California. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that the company had willfully violated her 2021 order forbidding it to stop developers from steering customers to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. She threw out the commission Apple had tried to charge on those outside sales and referred the matter to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” she wrote; “the cover-up made it worse.” Fortnite was back in the American App Store within days.
Google lost the same fight on the same ground when a California jury decided in December 2023 that the Play Store and its billing system formed an illegal monopoly, and in July 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld both the verdict and the order that came with it; Google must let rival app stores operate, permit alternative billing, and stop paying companies to keep out of app distribution. Epic’s chief executive called it a total victory. Anti-steering in the App Store, self-preferencing and a closed till in the Play Store; take the European postmark off the charges and they are the same ones a jury in San Francisco already returned.
In May the Supreme Court refused to pause Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s order but in June it agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding, so the question of how far Apple defied the order is still open.
What isn’t open, and what the appeal does not reach, is the 2021 injunction against blocking steering, or the jury’s monopoly verdict against Google that the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The core findings stand. American law looked at what these companies do and called it unlawful; the only live dispute is over how thoroughly Apple flouted the remedy.
Hellbound and Down 