The EU’s Latest Google Fine Confirms the DMA Was Built to Target American Success

The European Commission recently fined Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act (DMA)—the third major penalty that the EU has levied against the company in under a year. The announcement on July 23 followed a €2.95 billion antitrust fine in September 2025 and a more recent high court decision that Google must pay a €4.1 billion penalty in a long-running antitrust case. Taken together with dozens of other fines the EU has imposed on American tech firms, last week’s action against Google was further confirmation that the DMA functions less as a competition tool than as an extractive mechanism.

The difference this time is that the Trump administration sent a clear signal it won’t stand for this anymore. As the president said in a social media post on Friday, “The United States of America is not a ‘PIGGYBANK’ for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!” In retaliation, President Trump went on to announce that the administration will immediately initiate a Section 301 investigation into the EU’s pattern of fining U.S. tech firms.

This response is entirely justified: As ITIF argues, the DMA is discriminatory by design and there is a strong case for using Section 301 authority to retaliate. Meanwhile, Washington also should press this newfound leverage in trade negotiations by demanding structural reforms to the DMA to ensure fair treatment of U.S. companies.

Regulators claim Google has engaged in “self-preferencing” in Search by ranking its own shopping, hotel, and travel results above those of rivals, and in “anti-steering” on Google Play by barring developers from freely promoting offers available on alternative distribution channels and by charging steering-related fees that the Commission deems noncompliant without a clear rationale. But these alleged abuses are really aspects of procompetitive product design: Surfacing Google’s own results benefits users by allowing them to directly compare prices, while anti-steering measures and steering-related fees enable Google to recoup its Android investments, which are crucial to competition in the mobile market.

Google invests millions in building, refining, and upgrading its features because they make its products better to use. Punishing U.S. firms under the DMA not only erodes the competitive edge they have spent decades building but discourages them from introducing new features—to the detriment of European consumers. Google has warned that complying may force it to strip real-time features from Search and weaken safety protections on Google Play, leaving the very users the DMA claims to protect worse off.

This is one of the central problems with the DMA’s prohibitions on “self-preferencing” and “anti-steering”—they ignore consumer welfare. Instead, the law gives the Commission license to penalize American tech companies without ever showing consumer harm. The absence of a harm requirement, coupled with revenue-based thresholds that designate only a handful of platforms as “gatekeepers”––almost entirely U.S.-based firms––is a recipe for targeted enforcement and outsized fines against U.S. companies. As a result, the regulation has become a tool to shield domestic competitors rather than to regulate competition itself.

The DMA’s fining structure, similar to that of other EU digital laws, exemplifies its discriminatory intent. It calculates penalties as a percentage of a firm’s global turnover rather than its European revenue—a structure that falls disproportionately on U.S. firms with worldwide operations while sparing domestic competitors confined largely to their home market. Indeed, American companies have been subject to all of the nearly $2 billion in DMA fines the Commission has levied in just over a year. The recipients have included Apple (€500 million in April 2025), Meta (€200 million in April 2025) and Google (€890 million last week). These massive penalties drain critical resources that U.S. firms could invest in frontier innovation.

American technology companies are strategic assets in the global artificial intelligence (AI) race, and U.S. technological leadership depends on the advances these firms produce. They pour vast capital into the data centers, chips, and research that sustain the AI ecosystem. Capital diverted to European penalties is capital that cannot fund AI development at home. For example, Google recently committed $1.5 billion to expand a U.S. data center campus—the amount of the EU’s latest fine could underwrite a buildout of similar scale, bolstering the capacity on which American leadership rests.

This progress is threatened by the financial strain of complying with Europe’s regulatory regime—and the threat is spreading. As other countries model their regulations after European laws, DMA-style legislation is proliferating. The clearest examples are UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act, with similar legislation pending in Brazil and Korea.

As American firms absorb mounting penalties across this widening set of jurisdictions, Chinese platforms such as Alibaba Cloud––largely untouched by these regimes so far, due to their non-designation as “gatekeepers”—stand ready to fill the vacuum. Every market that shifts from American to Chinese platforms extends Beijing’s influence and its standards on data, surveillance, and state access. In an era of intensifying techno-economic rivalry between the United States and China, addressing this drift is imperative before Chinese standards become entrenched globally.

The Section 301 investigation that President Trump announced last week gives Washington new leverage to act against discriminatory digital trade enforcement and the spread of non-tariff attacks on U.S. tech firms. The administration should use that leverage by putting the DMA on the table in trade forums such as the recently established EU-US Digital Dialogue and press for structural reform of the DMA’s fine regime, ending global turnover as the basis for penalties and grounding enforcement in demonstrable harm. The United States should draw on its long-standing transatlantic partnership with the EU to insist on a level playing field for its companies abroad—before the European playbook hardens into the global standard.