Europe’s top competition authority has moved to strip Google of its iron grip over online search data, ordering the company to open up the information it collects to competing search engines and artificial intelligence services. The European Commission laid out the plan on Thursday , sending Google a set of preliminary findings under the Digital Markets Act. Under the proposal, Google would have to let outside search engines access the data it gathers on rankings, user queries, clicks, and page views. The company would have to offer this access on terms that are fair, reasonable, and consistent across the board. The goal, according to the Commission’s official report, is to give competing services a real shot at improving and eventually challenging Google’s hold on the search market. Teresa Ribera, who serves as Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, explained the thinking behind the move. “Data is a key input for online search and for developing new services, including AI. Access to this data should not be restricted in ways that could harm competition. In fast-moving markets, small changes can quickly have a big impact. We will not allow practices that risk closing markets or limiting choice,” she said. The proposal, published on April 16, 2026, covers six areas: who qualifies to receive the data, including whether AI chatbots that carry out search functions count; what data gets shared; how and how often it gets handed over; steps to protect the privacy of personal data; how pricing would work; and rules for managing access. Google fights back over privacy concerns The decision to include AI chatbots is a clear sign that Brussels sees these tools as direct competitors to traditional search. Google has spent decades building up a store of user behavior data that no rival has been able to match. That stockpile now sits at the center of a major legal fight. Google was formally charged in March 2025 with breaking the Digital Markets Act. The company has since pushed back hard against the latest proposals. Clare Kelly, Google’s senior competition counsel, said the company would challenge the measures, calling them a stretch far beyond what the law was ever meant to require. “Hundreds of millions of Europeans trust Google with their most sensitive searches, including private questions about their health, family, and finances, and the Commission’s proposal would force us to hand this data over to third parties, with dangerously ineffective privacy protections,” Kelly said. The company also accused some of the pressure behind the investigation of coming from rivals looking to take its data, and warned that the privacy protections being proposed would not hold up. Fines and a final deadline loom The findings released Thursday sit roughly halfway through a formal process that the Commission started on January 27, 2026. This process is designed to spell out exactly how a company must meet its legal obligations, rather than jumping straight to a penalty ruling. Still, the stakes are serious. If Google fails to meet whatever final requirements are set, it could face fines worth up to ten percent of Alphabet’s total global revenue for a year, a figure that could top 35 billion dollars. Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, said in the official report that the push is happening at a “crucial moment of growing interconnection with AI services.” A public consultation period opens Friday, April 17, 2026, and anyone who wants to weigh in has until May 1 to do so. The Commission plans to issue a final, binding ruling by July 27, 2026. The case is seen as a test of whether Europe can actually force a global technology company to open its most closely guarded assets. If it succeeds, the outcome could serve as a model for how governments elsewhere choose to handle the enormous data advantages held by large AI and internet companies. The July deadline will show whether the rules favor those sitting on vast stores of data or those with new ideas but no data of their own. There’s a middle ground between leaving money in the bank and rolling the dice in crypto. Start with this free video on decentralized finance .
