Yet again, in 2016, the European Commission placed Google’s alleged anti-competitive behaviour under the spotlight. Google was accused of misusing its dominant position as the provider of the Android operating system to stop competitors developing their own versions of it. By “nicely” persuading telephone manufacturers to use Google’s Android exclusively, at the expense of other versions, Google made it almost impossible for competitors to enter the market for mobile operating systems, which in turn held back technological development, according to the Commission’s 150-page statement of objections sent to Google and its parent Alphabet that year.
Google, however, cared less about the operating system than about the operating system being tied to its search engine. The Commission said Google also forced manufacturers to pre-install Google Search on every new Android telephone, which stopped competitors having a fair opportunity to enter the mobile search market. And why was Google so keen on exclusivity over mobile search? Because it cared less about search than about being able to arrange the results so that its own shopping service, and the sellers who paid for it, would dominate comparison shopping regardless of merit. Comparison shopping was, of course, the subject of yet another Commission investigation. Confused? I discussed all of the Commission’s cases against Google with the American attorney Bennet Kelley on Cranberry FM, and we asked the burning question: is Google a victim of an anti-trust witch-hunt? The interview is below.
What happened next
The courts have largely answered the question in the Commission’s favour. In the shopping case the Commission fined Google €2.42 billion in 2017 for favouring its own comparison service in search results, and the Court of Justice upheld the fine in September 2024 (Google and Alphabet v Commission, C-48/22 P). In the Android case the Commission fined Google €4.34 billion in July 2018 for the tying and exclusivity described above; the General Court trimmed the fine to €4.125 billion in 2022 and the Court of Justice dismissed Google’s final appeal in July 2026, so that fine now stands. The one case Google won was the third: the €1.49 billion fine of 2019 over exclusivity clauses in its AdSense contracts was annulled by the General Court in September 2024 (T-334/19) for errors in the Commission’s analysis. A fourth arrived in September 2025, when the Commission fined Google €2.95 billion for favouring its own services in the advertising technology chain (Commission press release, 5 September 2025), and since 2024 the Digital Markets Act has imposed on Google, as a designated gatekeeper, standing obligations not to favour its own services at all, enforced without the need to prove abuse case by case. In Britain the Competition and Markets Authority has designated Google as having strategic market status in search under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which opens the way to conduct requirements of the same kind. Whether that amounts to a witch-hunt or to the ordinary policing of a company with 90 per cent of the market is the question the 2016 interview asks; the fines, so far, total more than €9 billion and the courts have upheld the large majority of them.
First published 3 October 2016. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.