Strasbourg’s EU Parliament – Big Technology is facing its biggest challenge to date. Credit: Leonid Andronov via Canva.com
For years, Google’s defenses have always been the same. Android is free, flexible and competitive. However, the EU was not entirely sure about it. And now that EU court advisors have refused to appeal the company’s final appeal, it appears that the biggest anti-trust fine in European history is a permanent part of the legal playbook. At the heart of this case is more than a pre-installed app or a default search engine. It’s about how one company, which operates under the guise of openness and is shaped by billions of users, can see that software is installed and accessed by default.
A fine of 4.125 billion euros could control the headline. Still, Google’s true cost isn’t money, it’s a precedent that Brussels doesn’t allow it to grow and check its platform before calling it innovation. This time, it’s not just Android under a microscope. It is the overall idea of the digital ecosystem as a neutral ground.
How Google got here
It began in 2018 when the European Commission fined Google on record amounts to manage the Android operating system.
- Phone makers effectively required pre-installing Google Search in Chrome as a condition for accessing the Play Store.
- There was one condition that shaped hundreds of millions of users throughout the EU, with little room for rivalry and dominated the entire market.
Google appealed to the General Court in 2022. This supported the decision to lower the fine and agreed that the company had imposed legal restrictions on the manufacturer.
- Now, in 2025, the company’s final legal card and appeal to the EU’s court of justice appears to be nowhere to go.
- Advocate Julian Cocotte called Google’s argument “unconvincing” and said it was “unrealistic” to compare it to its hypothetical competitors.
- It may sound technical, but it cuts to the heart of the problem. If your market power is very large and you cannot compete under fair conditions, you are not offering a choice. You offer defaults – lock in and dress up as free.
What does this ruling mean?
The headline is a fine of 4.125 billion euros, but the real punishment is what the ruling says about the platform default. Google claims you can download another browser at any time, and you can change your search engine whenever you really need it.
However, when one company manages people who first saw it, the usage response is consistent. Is it enough to shape large-scale behavior and shape behavior? That’s the power, and that’s the power of the market.
This case makes one thing clear. Providing options does not mean offering competition, especially if most users don’t touch the settings.
Kokott’s recommendations – and history probably suggests that – establishes a legal precedent. Even if alternatives are technically present, default settings can be anti-competitive.
That one idea could ripple through future battles over Google as well as operating systems, voice assistants and app stores.
Why Europe continues to pursue Google
Europe has been fighting Google for the past decade. The EU has fined the shopping ad company for Android control in Adsense, earning a total of more than 8 billion euros. This is before considering the upcoming Digital Markets Act Enforcement, which could completely rebuild Google’s business.
However, unlike the United States, where legal battles are technically dragged on a frequent basis, Brussels frames these cases differently. It’s not just about consumer harm. It’s about structural distortions – when the company gets everything at the road, gate, and destination at once.
Google is the foundation for tweaking the means to tweak these foundations, such as search ads, maps, shopping, and YouTube.
So they chose to stop treating platforms like services and start treating them like infrastructure. That’s why this fine is important and that’s why it’s stuck. Europe is not just punishing this abuse. I’m rewriting the blueprint.
Digital Market Law
Google is waiting for a great ruling under the Digital Markets Act, which was first introduced in March 2022. You can see how companies like Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and more are winning titles.
For Google, that means that the bundle service provides a choice of real browsers and allows users to uninstall the defaults. More than that, it’s about redesigning an interface that doesn’t bring people back into the company’s ecosystem every turn.
The €4.125b fine is not merely a punishment for what Google did in 2018. This is ammunition for what regulators do after 2025. Sets the tone. Sets the boundary. And most importantly, send a message to all gatekeepers on the list. The era of self-politics is over.
What does this really say about power?
Europe builds barriers, Google builds tools. Somewhere between these two stories, there’s a place where most people live, taking advantage of applications they haven’t selected, running systems they didn’t configure, and trusting them to be neutral if they don’t trust the default.
In 2018, Google’s defense was that it gave users everything. Currently, the European position in 2025 is that if there is too much control, too little competition, too many steps to switch, and there is little chance of achieving that, too few European positions at the same time.
The identity behind all this is that language is about choice, about what they do, and who can shape the path first. So it’s bigger and cracks the logic that built that advantage in the first place.
