BRUSSELS — The European Commission’s days of outsized fines against Big Tech appear to be over.

When Brussels fined Google €890 million last month for breaches of the EU’s digital antitrust rules, it did so with little fanfare and a much lower price tag than in the cases it brought against the U.S. search giant in the previous decade.

The fine, along with penalties for Apple and Meta, was issued for breaches of the Digital Markets Act, a three-year-old EU regulation that sets guardrails for how big internet “gatekeepers” should behave on the European market. 

Most of the gatekeepers are American, including Amazon and Microsoft, meaning they bear the brunt of the DMA’s enforcement and compliance measures. That reality has drawn accusations from Washington that Brussels is discriminating against U.S. companies — along with threats of retaliation that could disrupt a fragile trade truce.

The fines against Google bring the total bill for breaches of the Digital Markets Act to €1.6 billion — a sum that pales in comparison with the antitrust fines of yesteryear. The EU’s highest court recently upheld a €4.1 billion abuse-of-dominance fine against Google dating back to 2018 — an era when Brussels resorted to brute financial force, in contrast to today’s greater emphasis on regulatory dialogue. 

Some industry watchers see the reduced penalties as evidence that the EU is giving up on its mission to defend the interests of smaller tech firms against the dominant platforms.

“The loss of interest is happening. The loss of engagement is happening. The loss of trust in the Commission being a neutral arbiter — it’s gone,” said Felix Styma, the Berlin-based coordinator of the Initiative for Neutral Search, a coalition of European digital firms that includes classifieds and marketplace group Adevinta and travel company GetYourGuide.

As for the fines: “It’s the price of doing business,” he said.

The Commission rejects the comparison. Each fine is set within the applicable legal framework and according to the facts of the case, said spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso: “It is not meaningful to compare the fines across instrument or company.”

For others, including academics and Commission officials, the shift is less a sign of a new strategy and more the product of a new, more technical approach to regulation whose effectiveness is best measured in its market impact — not by the fines it generates.

“The goal of the DMA is to change behavior, not to maximize fines,” said Alexandre de Streel, academic director of the digital research program at the Centre on Regulation in Europe, a Brussels-based think tank. “I don’t think you can judge the willingness or the effectiveness based on the fine imposed on the operator.”

What has changed is the machinery, he argues. The priorities related to digital market dominance remain as they were — data aggregation practices, self-preferencing by platforms and access to app stores.

The quiet instrument

One tool that is doing more of the DMA’s work is the so-called specification decision: a technical order setting out what compliance should look like, with no finding of illegality or fine. In July, one such decision forced Google to share search data with rivals, while another opened its Android smartphone operating system to rival AI assistants.

Kay Jebelli of the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition partly funded by Google and Apple, observes that the Commission wants to pursue a lower-profile strategy — in particular toward the Trump administration — while still packing a punch.

“The Commission has pretty much exhausted established competition theories,” Jebelli said. “As it ventures further into unknown territory, behavioral interventions like specification decisions and regulatory dialogue will stand on stronger legal footing and face less blowback from the U.S.”

Despite threatening new tariffs against Europe over the Google fine, Trump has yet to follow through. That may have more to do with his supporters’ attitudes toward the U.S. search giant than their feelings about Europe.

The Republican Party “has some sort of problem with Google — it’s not their favorite corporation,” said Barry Lynn of the Open Markets Institute. “A little bit of noise. It won’t become a major issue.”

Still, for European firms that want to take advantage of the DMA — and regain some of the market share swallowed by Big Tech — these quieter tools offer little solace. Even European tech champions like GetYourGuide or Allegro are dwarfed by the American gatekeepers on whom they largely depend for traffic and customer discovery.

“Specification proceedings are the wrong tool to address problems in search, app stores, bundling, cloud,” said Styma of the Initiative for Neutral Search. “It’s a good tool to fix smaller policy problems. But it doesn’t affect product design.” It also leaves “a super-limited basis for damages claims.”

Brussels denies it has changed course. 

“The Commission has not hesitated and will not hesitate to open non-compliance proceedings whenever necessary depending on concrete circumstances, while in others a specification procedure is warranted,” Cardoso said. The DMA hands Brussels “a varied toolbox,” he explained, and the Commission “always uses the tool that is most appropriate in the specific circumstances.”

Cases closed, quietly

In the past few weeks, the Commission has quietly wrapped up the first wave of cases — starting with the remaining Google probes.

And on Tuesday, Brussels indicated it would close its biggest outstanding DMA case (against Apple) with no penalty. The iPhone maker said its move to overhaul the terms it imposes on app developers across the EU — scrapping a per-install fee that had drawn complaints since 2024 — should head off a non-compliance decision by the Commission.

The Commission’s sign-off on Apple’s changes also brings an end to the post-decision procedure the EU executive opened after the €500 million fine for its anti-steering rules — under which Apple faced periodic penalty payments of up to 5 percent of global turnover if it failed to comply.

Asked whether the threat of daily fines had been lifted, Cardoso said the Commission was not considering periodic penalty payments at this stage.

Meta’s file sits in the same place. In November, after its own round of dialogue, it added a third option for users who want neither fully personalized ads nor a paid subscription. The Commission says it is monitoring how well that choice works. It has not said whether it is satisfied.

“Apple didn’t really get what it wanted — but nobody else really did either,” said Gene Burrus, counsel for the Coalition for App Fairness, which represents firms like Spotify and Epic Games.

Keeping score

Two and a half years in, the Commission has fined three companies and opened seven non-compliance proceedings, with two recently concluded against Google and a third that Apple expects to be formally closed in the coming weeks.

Anselm Küsters of the Centre for European Policy found that Commission decisions and rulings under the DMA rose 18 percent after Donald Trump’s January 2025 return to office, while formal enforcement decisions fell 37 percent. Stakeholder workshops, a route for complainants to reach case teams, fell from 12 to four.

Cardoso said the figures missed the point. “The implementation and enforcement of the DMA is not about numbers; it is about results,” he said, adding that statistics drawn from such a short period were not robust. Most compliance work, he said, happens in dialogue with gatekeepers, third parties and civil society, not in formal decisions.

Officials point instead to proceedings opened since November — including those concerning Google’s anti-spam policies that demote publisher content, its licensing of search data to competitors, and Android default settings. They also highlight changes resulting from behind-closed-doors regulatory dialogues, such as Microsoft’s quiet move last year to drop its default browser settings.

Yet as Brussels puts more emphasis on dialogue and compliance, companies challenging the gatekeepers are increasingly looking to national courts.

A German regional court in Mainz in August 2025 ordered Google to stop favoring Gmail during Android setup, applying the DMA directly.

In France, Liligo, a subsidiary of eDreams ODIGEO, brought a claim before the Paris Court of Economic Activities last October targeting Google’s alleged self-preferencing in flights.

Complainants elsewhere are also mulling further claims for enforcement or follow-on damages.

That shift need not undermine the DMA. De Streel argues that private lawsuits can reinforce the Commission’s enforcement, but warns against relying on the courts to do Brussels’ job. “It should not become a substitute,” he said.

The question is whether the growing role of litigation means the DMA is working as intended, with Commission enforcement backed up by national courts, or if it’s evidence that Brussels is ceding the leading role it assumed when the regulation was adopted.

Jebelli expects litigation to play an increasingly prominent role. “While we may see fewer fines from authorities, expect to still see big numbers in private damages litigation, which is only just ramping up,” he said.

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