European Union regulators fined Google €890 million on Thursday(nuova finestra), saying the company broke the bloc’s digital competition law by steering users toward its own services in search results and restricting what app developers are allowed to tell their customers.
The penalty, worth about $1 billion, closes two investigations the European Commission opened in March 2024 and makes Google the third company sanctioned under the Digital Markets Act. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, takes in roughly that much revenue in a day.
What regulators found
The European Commission split the fine in two. It attributed €460 million to self-preferencing in search, finding that Google gave its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results better placement than it gave competitors.
The remaining €430 million covers the Play Store, where regulators said Google barred developers from telling users about cheaper offers available elsewhere and charged steering fees beyond what the law permits.
Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice president for competition, said the best products should succeed on merit(nuova finestra) rather than on who owns the search engine. Google has 60 days to comply or face daily penalties of up to 5% of Alphabet’s worldwide turnover.
Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, called the decision “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants.(nuova finestra)” The company said it is weighing an appeal. Politico reported that the Commission reached its decision internally in March and announced it a day before temporary US tariffs on trading partners are due to expire.
A day of revenue
Alphabet reported $403 billion in revenue in 2025, roughly $1.1 billion a day, meaning Thursday’s penalty is worth less than 24 hours of business.
Proton tracks what Big Tech pays in fines each year. In 2025, regulators worldwide levied about $7.8 billion against Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Amazon, the largest annual total we have recorded.
Measured against free cash flow, those four companies could have cleared the entire year of penalties in 28 days. Alphabet drew about $4.24 billion of it, more than any of them, and could have covered its share in about three weeks.
The pattern holds going back further. EU regulators have fined Google more than €10 billion since 2017, and Europe’s highest court upheld the largest of those(nuova finestra), a €4.1 billion Android penalty, on July 2.
None of it changed how the company operates, however, because none of it cost more than operating that way earns.
What the fine does not reach
Self-preferencing is a competition finding, but what it protects is an advertising business. Results that keep users on Google surfaces keep them measurable. Privacy-first services rarely lose on quality. They lose on placement.
For the first time in a long while, governments are taking their duty to citizens seriously and fighting the monopolies that corrupted the internet’s early promise. But make no mistake: the fines are still too small to make Big Tech sit up. Unwinding Big Tech’s structural advantages, rather than the checks it writes, is what holds real promise for restoring freedom and fairness online. A fairer internet would let services that protect personal data instead of exploiting it succeed on merit.
Building that better internet will take years. Until then, the burden falls on you, and the choice carries much further than it may seem: Keeping your data out of Big Tech’s hands protects your information and cuts into the ad revenue that pays for the conduct regulators keep fining.
The simplest defense is end-to-end encryption. Proton is funded by the people who use it rather than by advertisers, so it has no reason to collect your data. Sign up free and take control of your email, calendar, photos and files, browsing(nuova finestra), and passwords and online identity.
