--- title: EU fines Google €890m for competition breaches over... description: The European Commission has fined Google €890m for violating the EU's Digital Markets Act. Google faces a €460m penalty for self-preferencing its own services... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/eu-fines-google-890m-for-competition-breaches-over-search-and-apps-oetdzc6h6 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: EU fines Google €890m for competition breaches over search and apps | daily.dev og:description: The European Commission has fined Google €890m for violating the EU's Digital Markets Act. Google faces a €460m penalty for self-preferencing its own services... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/eu-fines-google-890m-for-competition-breaches-over-search-and-apps-oetdzc6h6 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/OetDzc6h6.png og:image:alt: EU fines Google €890m for competition breaches over search and apps og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # EU fines Google €890m for competition breaches over search and apps **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 5 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The European Commission has fined Google €890m for violating the EU's Digital Markets Act. Google faces a €460m penalty for self-preferencing its own services (shopping, hotel deals, flights) in search results over competitors, and a €430m fine for blocking app developers from directing users to cheaper offers outside the Google Play Store. Google has been ordered to treat third-party services fairly and non-discriminatorily in search results and allow developers to promote offers outside its app store. The commission noted Google has already begun testing search result changes. The fine comes amid geopolitical tension as it risks provoking a response from the Trump administration, though EU officials insist the timing is unrelated to ongoing tariff negotiations. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 268 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-31). **TL;DR:** The community is divided on whether EU fines on Google are effective deterrents or merely a cost of doing business; debate also sprawls into EU tech competitiveness, the Cyber Resilience Act, and geopolitics. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 40% mixed · 40% skeptical **The case for** - EU fines have historically produced concrete behavioral changes from Google (e.g., Android unbundling, shopping service restructuring). - The DMA allows fines up to 10–20% of global revenue for repeat offenders, which would be genuinely painful even for Google. - Fines flow into the EU general budget, reducing member-state contributions and indirectly funding public services. **The pushback** - Google continues to face new violations years after paying prior fines, suggesting limited long-term deterrence. - The Cyber Resilience Act is seen by some as imposing compliance burdens that disproportionately harm small EU hardware startups over large corporations. - The fine (~€890M) is small relative to Google's ~$400B annual revenue, making it easy to absorb as a routine business cost. - EU fines do not compensate affected individuals directly, and the regulatory model is criticized as a revenue mechanism rather than genuine consumer protection. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters are split between viewing EU fines as meaningful regulatory tools with real compliance effects and dismissing them as a de facto tax that fails to curb repeat offenses, with side debates on EU tech competitiveness and geopolitics. **Hottest debate:** Whether EU fines actually change Big Tech behavior long-term or simply function as a predictable, tolerable cost of doing business. **Open questions** - At what fine level (or what alternative mechanism) would Google and similar companies genuinely change systemic behavior rather than just the specific practice cited? - Should EU competition fines be structured to escalate exponentially for repeat offenders across related categories of violations? - Does the Cyber Resilience Act's compliance burden actually improve security outcomes, or does it mainly generate paperwork while driving hardware startups out of Europe? **Highlights** > > The EU has been fining Google for years to no avail. Me after a quick research: 2017: €2.42 billion fine for favoring its own comparison shopping service. Results: huge changes to Google's shopping service. 2018: €4 billion fine over Android-related practices. Results: Google Play separately from Google Search and Chrome, and manufacturers gained more flexibility over preinstalled apps. > — [HatchedLake721 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020799) > This fine is more of a warning shot. The DMA allows for fines of up to 10% of global revenue or 20% in the case of repeat offenders. These 890M are a first warning. Now Google has some time to react, but if they don't implement what is required of them, another, higher, fine will be issued. 20% of global revenue is not just cost of doing business, to any business. > — [vrganj on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021041) > Imagine regular laws worked that way, where a prior conviction is only relevant if it was for the exact same crime, and you can go around committing dozens of crimes and be treated like a first offender every time because this time you chose robbery and last time it was theft. > — [p-e-w on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020701) > > You need an entry to the program, but when you are in, it can account for 50-70% or more in your early stage funding. It is almost entirely unsurprising that the EU tech industry is such a disaster area when people say things like this as if they are a good thing. > — [mosura on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020029) > These fines go toward the EU's general budget as "other income" which reduces the amount that member states must contribute annually for the budget to balance. So the EU partially funds itself by leveraging fines like this on AliExpress, Google, Meta, Apple, etc. and the trickle-down savings to member states is then (presumably) used to fund public works and social services locally. > — [petcat on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020515) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019220) · 112 points · 268 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Google faces high triple-digit million euro EU fine before summer, Handelsblatt reports](https://daily.dev/posts/google-faces-high-triple-digit-million-euro-eu-fine-before-summer-handelsblatt-reports-oe1l2wutc) · The Next Web · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [Google loses final appeal over record €4.1 billion EU Android fine](https://daily.dev/posts/google-loses-final-appeal-over-record-4-1-billion-eu-android-fine-splthml06) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#google](https://daily.dev/tags/google), [#app-store](https://daily.dev/tags/app-store) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/eu-fines-google-890m-for-competition-breaches-over-search-and-apps-oetdzc6h6) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"EU fines Google €890m for competition breaches over search and apps","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/eu-fines-google-890m-for-competition-breaches-over-search-and-apps-oetdzc6h6","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/eu-fines-google-890m-for-competition-breaches-over-search-and-apps-oetdzc6h6"},"datePublished":"2026-07-23T11:11:42.174Z","dateModified":"2026-07-31T09:55:34.899Z","description":"The European Commission has fined Google €890m for violating the EU's Digital Markets Act. 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