August 10, 2026

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The European Post

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August 10, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
Five Joint Defence Projects Launch Europe’s Military ShieldElectrification Plan Aims to Make Europe First Electro ContinentHorizon Europe Budget Fight Heats Up as Ministers Push BackGoogle’s DMA Fine Sets Off a Transatlantic Tariff ClashTwenty New University Alliances Join Erasmus for Two YearsForeign Subsidies Case Puts Temu in the EU’s SightsVan Tachographs Now Mandatory for Cross-Border FleetsStress Test Exposes Gaps in Euro Area Bank DefencesEurope Bets on a Gulf Partnership Before the Riyadh SummitWhy the Atlantic Route Now Runs Through MauritaniaKyiv and Chisinau Advance as the EU Accession Talks Gather PaceEurope’s New Digital Border System Beds In After a Rocky RolloutBrussels Mounts Its Largest Wildfire Response as the Fires SpreadRetail Spending Slipped in June, Wrong-Footing EconomistsHeatwave Warning Puts Brussels on Alert for Vulnerable GroupsKANAL’s 230 Million Euro Museum Sets a November Opening DatePension Savings Rules Get a Reset as the EU Scraps the 1% CapMedicine Shortages Move to the Heart of Europe’s Pharma ResetJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Five Joint Defence Projects Launch Europe’s Military ShieldElectrification Plan Aims to Make Europe First Electro ContinentHorizon Europe Budget Fight Heats Up as Ministers Push BackGoogle’s DMA Fine Sets Off a Transatlantic Tariff ClashTwenty New University Alliances Join Erasmus for Two YearsForeign Subsidies Case Puts Temu in the EU’s SightsVan Tachographs Now Mandatory for Cross-Border FleetsStress Test Exposes Gaps in Euro Area Bank DefencesEurope Bets on a Gulf Partnership Before the Riyadh SummitWhy the Atlantic Route Now Runs Through MauritaniaKyiv and Chisinau Advance as the EU Accession Talks Gather PaceEurope’s New Digital Border System Beds In After a Rocky RolloutBrussels Mounts Its Largest Wildfire Response as the Fires SpreadRetail Spending Slipped in June, Wrong-Footing EconomistsHeatwave Warning Puts Brussels on Alert for Vulnerable GroupsKANAL’s 230 Million Euro Museum Sets a November Opening DatePension Savings Rules Get a Reset as the EU Scraps the 1% CapMedicine Shortages Move to the Heart of Europe’s Pharma ResetJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?

Big Tech fines in Europe pass six billion euros in two years

Ingvar Lemarquis
Policy Monitor, Competition and Antitrust

Luxembourg: The combined value of European Union antitrust and competition fines imposed on Apple, Google and Meta since the start of 2024 has crossed six billion euros, according to figures compiled from Commission decisions. The cumulative tally reflects an intensification of European competition enforcement against US-headquartered platforms even as transatlantic political pressures have rendered each individual case more contested.

The largest single penalty was the 2.95 billion-euro fine imposed on Google in September 2025 for distorting competition in the advertising technology sector. The Commission concluded that Google had illegally favoured its own digital advertising services, the fourth Commission penalty against the company in the past decade. In response, Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera stated that Google must propose a serious remedy to address its conflicts of interest and signalled that structural remedies — potentially including divestitures — would be on the table if the company’s voluntary proposals proved inadequate. Google has chosen to contest the decision, and its remedy package, submitted in the weeks following the ruling, stopped short of structural separation.

Apple faced two separate decisions. In March 2024, an antitrust ruling imposed a 1.84 billion-euro penalty for abusing the company’s dominant position in the distribution of music streaming apps. In April 2025, the Commission imposed an additional 500 million euros under the Digital Markets Act for failing to comply with anti-steering obligations — restrictions Apple placed on developers that prevented them from informing customers about alternative purchase channels. Meta received a 797 million-euro fine in November 2024 over practices benefiting Facebook Marketplace, and an additional 200 million euros in April 2025 for its pay-or-consent advertising model, which the Commission found forced users to surrender personal data unless they paid a subscription.

The Digital Services Act produced its first sanction in December 2025, when Elon Musk’s platform X was fined 120 million euros for breaching transparency requirements. The fine, modest by absolute standards, established the procedural template for DSA enforcement and confirmed that the regulation applies in practice as well as on paper.

Aggregate Commission estimates suggest that ongoing investigations under the DMA and DSA could yield collective fines exceeding 100 billion euros if non-compliance findings reach the maximum penalty thresholds. The figure is theoretical — actual outcomes have consistently been an order of magnitude smaller — but it captures the structural exposure facing the five largest platforms.

A Financial Times report in January 2025 indicated that the Commission was reassessing DMA investigations against Apple, Meta and Google, raising concerns among consumer groups that probes would be scaled back to avoid escalating tensions with US President Donald Trump. The reassessment did not publicly materialise, and the Commission’s enforcement output during 2025 set a record: five infringement decisions and five settlements across the year, even with the DMA addressing many competition issues through ex ante regulation. National competition authorities in France, Germany and Italy contributed additional cases, bringing the total enforcement actions against US Big Tech in Europe past 60.

On 9 December 2025, the Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google’s use of online content to train artificial intelligence models and produce AI Overviews on search result pages. The probe examines whether Google scrapes content from web publishers without appropriate compensation and without offering a meaningful opt-out mechanism. It also covers whether YouTube videos have been used to train generative-AI models without compensating creators or providing opt-out rights. The investigation extends competition enforcement into the AI value chain in ways that overlap with the AI Act and the forthcoming Code of Practice for general-purpose AI.

Microsoft and Amazon face ongoing scrutiny under both DMA gatekeeper obligations and ex post antitrust rules. Microsoft’s cloud licensing practices and the bundling of Teams with Office 365, which the company has already partially unbundled in response to earlier Commission concerns, remain subject to monitoring. Amazon’s use of third-party seller data continues to be examined in national jurisdictions. The pattern suggests that 2026 will be defined as much by remedy design as by new fines: the test of structural separation, behavioural commitments and compliance monitoring across overlapping digital regulations.

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