The European Commission has stopped treating the Digital Markets Act as a paper tiger. On 23 July 2026 it fined Google €890 million for breaking the rulebook, and the message to Silicon Valley landed hard: Brussels will spend real political capital to enforce the law it spent years drafting.

The penalty splits neatly in two. Regulators charged €460 million because Google favoured its own services in Search, and €430 million because the company blocked app developers from steering users toward cheaper deals outside Google Play. Both practices sit at the core of what the DMA was written to stop.

What makes this DMA fine different from the antitrust cases that preceded it is speed. Google now has sixty days, until 21 September 2026, to change its conduct. If it misses that deadline, the Commission can impose periodic penalty payments of up to five percent of the company’s average daily worldwide turnover, a figure that would dwarf the headline fine within weeks.

Google has pushed back hard. The company says it is weighing an appeal and warns that the ordered redesign would degrade the product millions of Europeans rely on. Yet an appeal buys little breathing room. Filing a case at the General Court would not suspend the sixty-day clock, and a full ruling could take two to three years.

The action fits a pattern the executive has built through 2026. Earlier in the year regulators fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million under the same law, and the Google decision pushes the company’s cumulative EU liabilities, once older antitrust cases are counted, past €10 billion. The Commission is no longer testing the DMA. It is operating it.

Critics, many of them in Washington, read the sequence as a campaign against American success. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argued that the DMA targets US platforms by design, since those firms are large enough to count as gatekeepers. Commission officials reject that framing and note that the obligations apply to any company crossing the size thresholds, whatever its nationality.

The deeper question is behavioural. Fines alone rarely change how a dominant platform operates; the threat of open-ended daily penalties might. By tying the €890 million to a hard compliance deadline and a percentage-of-turnover backstop, regulators designed a mechanism that bites harder the longer Google resists.

For the wider market, the stakes run past one company. Rival search engines, app developers and price-comparison sites have spent a decade complaining that self-preferencing quietly starved them of traffic. A genuine redesign in September would hand them a rare opening. If Google complies on paper while preserving its advantage, the DMA’s credibility takes the damage instead.