On July 16, 2026, the European Commission adopted two binding decisions ordering Alphabet's Google to open parts of its Android operating system to competing artificial intelligence assistants and to share anonymised Google Search data with rival search engines, remedies the Commission says were necessary after Google's own compliance proposals proved ineffective.

Two rulings under one law

The Commission issued both decisions under the Digital Markets Act, the EU regulation that imposes behavioural obligations on the largest digital platforms, known as gatekeepers. Google has held that status since September 6, 2023, when the Commission designated eight of its services, including Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube, the Android operating system, Chrome, Google Shopping and its online advertising business, as core platform services. Full compliance with those obligations became mandatory for Google's designated services on March 7, 2024.

The two decisions announced on July 16 rest on separate provisions of the same law. The first addresses Article 6(7), which requires operating system gatekeepers to provide developers with free and effective interoperability with hardware and software features under their control. The second addresses Article 6(11), which requires online search engine gatekeepers to share anonymised search data with eligible rivals under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, a standard commonly shortened to FRAND terms.

Both cases began the same day, January 27, 2026, when the Commission opened what the law calls specification proceedings, a formal mechanism that lets regulators define exactly what compliance requires in granular technical terms, rather than leaving a gatekeeper to interpret a broad obligation on its own. The Commission communicated preliminary findings and published proposed measures for public comment on April 16, 2026, in the search-data case, and April 27, 2026, in the Android AI case, before adopting final, binding versions three months later.

One distinction shapes how this news should be read. Specification proceedings, the Commission noted in its press release, are separate from non-compliance investigations and do not assess whether a gatekeeper has already broken the law; consequently, they carry no financial penalty. That marks a sharp contrast with other Google matters moving through European courts in parallel. The Court of Justice of the European Union on July 2, 2026, confirmed a 4.125 billion euro fine against Google over historical Android practices, a case with no legal connection to this week's decisions beyond a shared operating system. Separately, a different, still-pending Digital Markets Act fine tied to self-preferencing in Google Search results and Gemini's role in AI Overviews had been expected before the Commission's summer recess, and remains unresolved.

Opening Android's AI layer

Eleven features, four categories

Roughly 60 percent of European mobile users carry an Android device, according to the Commission's decision, and until now, competing AI assistants have had only partial access to the operating system functions that make an assistant genuinely useful. Gemini, Google's own assistant, has by contrast enjoyed comparatively unrestricted access to those same functions, an asymmetry that PPC Land documented in July 2025, when Google's AI assistant gained automatic Android access to phone dialling and messaging data that competing assistants could not obtain through equivalent channels.

The July 16 decision identifies 11 Android features that must become interoperable, grouped into four categories. Invocation covers how a person starts an interaction with an assistant, whether through a voice command or a home-button press. Context covers an assistant's ability to draw on data from apps, sensors or the screen to understand a user's situation. Actions on apps and the operating system covers the ability to carry out tasks on a user's behalf. Access to resources covers use of hardware and software capacity, including Google's own on-device AI models.

In practice, the measures would let a person summon a rival assistant by voice much as they might currently say "Hey Google," delegate a task such as booking a taxi, request a live-translated conversation, or receive a proactive suggestion, such as being shown a flight number stored in an email when a travelling companion asks about it by message. An assistant could also complete a multi-step errand, such as ordering food through a delivery app, without a person tapping through each screen individually.

A staggered deadline running into 2028

Google must build these capabilities into its next major Android release, Android 18, and finish by August 1, 2027, at the latest, according to the decision's implementation timeline. A more technically demanding requirement, letting several AI services listen for their own wake words at once, known as concurrent hotword detection, carries a longer runway of Android 19, due by August 1, 2028. The Commission's own statement puts a public-facing marker on the same rollout, saying users should start benefiting from the Android changes as of July 2027.

For a handful of especially sensitive functions, including screen automation, structured on-device integration and centralised access to data stored on the device, Google may impose objective, non-discriminatory eligibility conditions verified by independent certifiers, rather than opening access unconditionally to every applicant. Google must publish draft terms for that certification programme by February 1, 2027, finalise them by May 1, 2027, and begin accepting applications from that date, with each assessment completed within four weeks. Users retain the ability to grant or withhold consent for any assistant to use any given feature, and device manufacturers keep the freedom to customise Android's interface and pre-installed software, so long as those changes do not block the required interoperability itself. The Commission has said it will monitor Google's implementation over the following two years, with regular progress reports due from the company.

Search data changes hands

A 90 percent market and a data monopoly

Google Search has held a market share above 90 percent in the EU for decades, the Commission's guidance on the decision states, a figure that surfaces repeatedly across the regulatory record. A University of Antwerp analysis published in early July 2026 arrived at a similar number, finding that Digital Markets Act remedies had shifted roughly six million EU users to Firefox while leaving Google with approximately 90 percent of the search market, a scale advantage the Commission argues no rival can currently match, since no competitor collects comparable volumes of query, click, ranking and view data.

Article 6(11) already obliged Google to share that kind of data, but according to the Commission's guidance, Alphabet's initial compliance offer fell well short: it stripped out between 90 and 100 percent of unique search queries and excluded AI chatbots offering search functions from the list of eligible recipients, producing what the Commission described bluntly as no meaningful uptake among potential beneficiaries. PPC Land reported on the Commission's preliminary findings in that case back in April 2026, when the proposed measures first went out for consultation, and on the pressure that preceded it, including an open letter from 18 European trade groups in March 2026 urging Brussels to act on Google's search compliance.

What must be shared, and what stays out

The final measures require Google to share ranking, query, click and view data generated on both free and paid search results, covering the queries users type, metadata such as language and device type, the URLs users viewed, how users interacted with results, and where a given result was positioned on the page. Several categories are explicitly excluded to protect individual users: no account information or search histories, no precise timestamps, no long or rare-word queries that could identify a searcher, generalised rather than exact location data, aggregated rather than precise interaction durations, and no URLs tied to paid results, meaning advertising clicks themselves are stripped from the shared dataset.

Recipients also face use restrictions. The data cannot be used to train general-purpose AI models, to build unrelated products such as advertising or consumer-profiling tools, or to systematically reproduce Google's own search results rather than developing independent technology. Permitted uses include improving query understanding, such as spelling correction and autocomplete; improving ranking and retrieval systems, including the kind of real-time web retrieval AI chatbots rely on for factual grounding; and improving how a search index is built and prioritised.

Anonymisation sits at the centre of the decision. Google must apply what the Commission calls a multi-layered technical method, developed with internal and external privacy experts and aligned with draft joint guidelines on the interplay between the DMA and the GDPR that the Commission and the European Data Protection Board have been refining since a public consultation drew more than 100 submissions, published in redacted form in March 2026. Technical suppression is backed by contractual obligations covering data retention and bans on onward sharing, plus a mandatory independent audit within six months of a recipient starting to process the data, followed by annual audits after that. The anonymisation approach itself will be reviewed every two years, and the Commission can reopen the file at any time under Article 89 if new evidence, including independent third-party testing, shows the safeguards are not holding up in practice. Google may also screen out a specific applicant on cybersecurity or data-protection grounds before sharing anything with it.

Who qualifies, what it costs, and when

Eligibility is limited to companies that already run an online search engine as a genuine economic activity in the EU for at least two consecutive years, or that were founded less than two years ago but have raised more than 50 million euros in capital, combined with a minimum of 50,000 monthly average EU users over the past year. Applicants under sanction, or controlled by a country judged to pose serious cybersecurity or data-protection risks, are excluded, and Google can seek a public-security exemption from the Commission for a specific case. Approved beneficiaries can access data for up to five years each, with a minimum sharing latency of seven days after a query is entered.

Pricing follows a cost-recovery formula rather than an open market rate. Google may charge for the incremental costs of preparing, storing and transmitting the dataset, plus a reasonable return on capital that cannot exceed Alphabet's weighted average cost of capital. An additional margin is allowed only in narrow circumstances and is capped at the operating margin of Google's own search business; it will not apply to micro, small or medium-sized companies at all. Before committing to a licence, prospective beneficiaries can test three tiers of sample data: a small real dataset, a fully synthetic one, and a larger representative sample reserved for applicants that have already passed an independent audit.

The rollout follows a fixed schedule. Google must submit its eligibility application form and publish an information page for prospective beneficiaries by the end of August 2026; provide template licence agreements, test samples and cost estimates by September 2026; finalise the anonymised dataset and submit technical detail on latency and personal-data detection tools by November 2026; and set final pricing by January 2027, the same month actual data sharing is due to begin.

Two sides of the same ruling

Teresa Ribera, the Commission's Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, framed both decisions as consumer-choice measures. "Society is going through a profound digital transformation," she said, adding that the goal was to help "smaller competitors, search engines, or AI assistants, to compete and provide that choice, while protecting the user's privacy." Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said the measures aimed "to support innovation and diversity in the European Union," expressing hope that they would help "emerging alternatives to Google Search and Google's AI services, such as Gemini."

Google's response arrived the same day. Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs at Google and Alphabet, wrote that the decisions "risk undermining vital privacy and security guardrails for millions of Europeans," arguing the company had "repeatedly offered solutions to safeguard users while satisfying the DMA's goals." On the Android ruling specifically, Walker wrote that AI assistants "already safely access Android's capabilities, with phone makers playing a key role in vetting them," and that the new requirement "threatens device security by granting external apps sensitive and powerful device permissions without these safeguards." He cited the EU's own cybersecurity agency as warning that "security fundamentals matter more than ever in the age of AI." On the search-data ruling, Walker warned that "Europeans' private searches would be exposed to unfamiliar companies, without adequate anonymisation of the data and without user knowledge or consent," a scenario he said would "weaken citizens' privacy, risk business trade secrets, and endanger national security." He added that Google would keep "advocating for a balanced approach that protects privacy and security while supporting market goals," while noting the Commission's decision recognised that "a flexible, evidence-based process will be critical" as circumstances change.

Both decisions state that they respect Google's rights of defence and remain open to review by EU courts, an avenue Google has used before, most recently in its unsuccessful appeal of the Android antitrust fine confirmed on July 2.

Why this matters beyond Brussels

For search advertisers, the practical question is which companies benefit first, not merely which companies are legally entitled to. A widely discussed analysis published in early July 2026 found that Digital Markets Act contestability measures had, so far, done more for Microsoft's Bing and Mozilla's Firefox than for European challengers, a pattern its author expects could repeat with search-data access, since Bing and DuckDuckGo already have the infrastructure to exploit new data rights immediately, while European projects such as Ecosia and Qwant would need to build that capacity first. Whether the January 2027 start date changes that dynamic will depend on how quickly each applicant clears the audit and eligibility process, and how much of the anonymised dataset survives contact with real product development.

The Android decision sits alongside a related, though legally distinct, precedent. In June 2026, the Commission used interim antitrust measures, a different legal tool entirely, to order Meta to restore free access to the WhatsApp Business API for competing general-purpose AI assistants after finding the company had effectively locked rivals out. The two cases point in the same direction: regulators increasingly treat the ability to reach users through a dominant AI assistant, whether embedded in a phone's operating system or inside a messaging app, as a competition concern in its own right, rather than a mere extension of existing search or social-media dominance.

For publishers and marketers building around AI-driven discovery, the search-data measures carry a narrower but concrete implication. The dataset explicitly covers the retrieval signals that AI chatbots use for grounding, meaning up-to-date factual answers pulled from the live web, which could let more search and chatbot providers build features that currently depend on scale only Google possesses. Whether that translates into a meaningfully different set of players fielding paid search campaigns within the next two years is a question the Commission's own scheduled reviews, due in 2027 and every two years thereafter, are designed to help answer.

Timeline

  • September 6, 2023: The European Commission designates Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Google Shopping and Google's online advertising services as DMA core platform services.
  • March 7, 2024: DMA obligations become legally binding for Google's designated services.
  • January 27, 2026: The Commission opens specification proceedings on Android AI interoperability under Article 6(7) and Google Search data sharing under Article 6(11).
  • April 16, 2026: The Commission communicates preliminary findings and publishes proposed search-data-sharing measures for public feedback.
  • April 27, 2026: The Commission publishes proposed Android AI interoperability measures for public feedback.
  • July 16, 2026: The Commission adopts both final, binding specification decisions.
  • End of August 2026: Deadline for Google to submit its search-data eligibility application form and publish an information page for prospective beneficiaries.
  • September 2026: Deadline for Google to provide template licence agreements, test data samples and cost estimates for search data sharing.
  • November 2026: Deadline for Google to finalise the anonymised search dataset and submit technical detail on latency and detection tools.
  • January 2027: Deadline for Google to finalise search-data pricing; search data sharing with eligible beneficiaries is due to begin.
  • February 1, 2027: Deadline for Google to publish draft eligibility terms for sensitive Android AI features.
  • May 1, 2027: Deadline for Google to finalise eligibility terms and begin accepting certification applications for sensitive Android AI features.
  • July 2027: Users are expected to start benefiting from the Android interoperability changes.
  • August 1, 2027: Deadline for Google to implement the 11 required Android AI features in Android 18.
  • August 1, 2028: Deadline for Google to implement concurrent hotword detection in Android 19.

Summary

Who: The European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology issued the decisions against Alphabet's Google, affecting third-party AI assistant developers and rival online search engines and AI chatbots with search functions across the EU and EEA.

What: Two binding Digital Markets Act specification decisions, one requiring Google to open 11 Android features to competing AI assistants, the other requiring Google to share anonymised Search ranking, query, click and view data with eligible rivals under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

When: The decisions were adopted on July 16, 2026, following specification proceedings opened on January 27, 2026, with implementation deadlines running from August 2026 through August 2028.

Where: The measures apply across the European Union and the European Economic Area.

Why: The Commission found Google's earlier voluntary compliance proposals ineffective, including a search-data offer that stripped out between 90 and 100 percent of unique queries, and said binding technical specifications were needed to give competing AI services and search engines a genuine opportunity to compete with Google's Android and Search dominance.