Alveena Ahmad
Google filed two appeals at the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg this week, challenging orders that would force it to share search data with rival engines and open Android to competing AI assistants. The orders, issued by the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act on July 16, require Google to give competing search engines and AI chatbots access to anonymized search and click data starting in January 2027, and to give rival AI assistants the same access Gemini has to 11 Android phone features, including voice activation, by August 2027. Google argues the data-sharing rule in particular cannot be made safe and is asking the court to block it before the deadline arrives.
What Brussels actually ordered
The Commission’s own guidance, published on its Digital Markets Act site, frames the two requirements as separate fixes for separate problems. The Android measure is meant to stop Google from giving its own Gemini assistant a structural head start on the operating system it controls, by opening the same phone-level hooks, voice activation, in-app actions, and default-assistant status, to competitors. The search data measure is meant to address a longer-standing complaint that Google’s scale in search cannot be matched by rivals who have no equivalent volume of query and click data to train and rank against. Google was already fined 890 million euros in July for separate Digital Markets Act breaches involving self-preferencing in Search and restrictions on how apps in Google Play could direct users to other payment options.
Google’s objection
Google’s case rests almost entirely on the search data order. Oliver Bethell, the company’s senior director for competition, said in a statement reported by Euronews that “people use Search for their most personal questions, from medical worries to close relationships,” and that “mandating we share these personal queries without adequate safeguards would cause irreversible harm to user privacy.” Google’s position is that anonymization at the scale the Commission is asking for cannot fully prevent individual search histories from being reconstructed by a party that receives the data, and that the order does not give users a way to consent to or opt out of having their queries included.
On Android, Google’s argument is narrower: it says the platform is already open to competing assistants and services, and that the Commission’s order goes beyond what is needed to fix any genuine competition problem.
Why the Commission disagrees
The Commission’s position, laid out when it issued the guidance in July, is that its safeguards are specifically designed to prevent any single search engine or AI company from reconstructing an individual user’s search history, while still giving competitors enough aggregated signal to improve their own ranking and answer quality. Regulators view the current gap as close to unbridgeable without a data-sharing rule: no rival has anywhere near Google’s volume of everyday search behavior to learn from, and that gap compounds every year Google’s assistant and search products keep improving on the back of it.
The clock keeps running regardless
Filing an appeal does not pause the underlying order. Unless Google separately asks for and wins interim relief, the January 2027 search-data deadline and the August 2027 Android deadline both remain in force while the case is heard. EU General Court proceedings of this kind typically run well over a year, which means Google could be required to start complying with rules a court has not yet ruled on, or could win a reversal after competitors have already built products around data Google was forced to hand over. Either outcome will shape how much leverage the Digital Markets Act actually has the next time Brussels orders a large platform to open up a product it built alone.
