BRUSSELS — The European Union should try to stay consistent with authorities elsewhere as it decides whether to order a breakup of Google’s advertising business, the bloc’s competition chief told POLITICO.

Teresa Ribera’s call for reflection marks a shift from the European Commission’s line a year ago that Google should break itself up, as the EU executive imposed a €2.95 billion fine for abuse of dominance in advertising. The U.S. search giant countered in November with a proposal of behavioral remedies only.

Her remarks on the need for regulatory alignment are especially significant as they come only days after a U.S. judge declined to force Google to sell its ad exchange.

“It’s always advisable to be sufficiently consistent, both for the companies, these global companies, the users and the regulators,” Ribera told POLITICO in an interview.

With the Trump administration threatening tariffs in response to EU enforcement while pursuing its own Big Tech crackdown, critics of America’s digital giants are starting to fear that pressure from an unpredictable U.S. could undermine Europe’s resolve to pursue its own agenda to rein in the dominant platforms.

The Commission has not yet seen the judge’s reasoning, which remains under seal, and Ribera said it was “respectfully curious” to read it.

Consistency is harder than it sounds. 

President Donald Trump threatened a trade investigation into the EU within a day of Brussels fining Google €890 million in July under the Digital Markets Act. His trade representative, Jamieson Greer, has called the Commission’s recent actions on Android and Search a de facto forced technology transfer.

At the same time, U.S. courts have been imposing remedies in Big Tech cases that go further than some of the measures Brussels has pursued.

“Europe must follow its own path,” said Andreas Schwab, a German MEP with the center-right European People’s Party. “While we respect the independence of the American judiciary, behavioral measures alone have repeatedly proven insufficient to resolve structural conflicts of interest in digital markets.”

Watching the courts

Alignment is not only a problem when Washington retreats; it also arises when American courts go further than Brussels has been willing to.

In April 2025, a U.S. judge barred Apple from taking a commission on purchases made through external links in apps; the ban has applied to commissions on those sales in the U.S. since then.

In Europe, where similar conduct drew a €500 million fine under the Digital Markets Act, the Commission in August accepted Apple’s revised terms, which will still allow the company to charge a fee on purchases made through external links.

“It’s a weird dynamic,” said Gene Burrus, global policy counsel for the Coalition for App Fairness, a developer group founded by Epic and Spotify. The wild card, he said, is a U.S. court acting in response to private litigation, with the U.S. government not part of it at all.

So far, in the major Google cases, U.S. courts have declined to order a breakup.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found last April that Google had monopolized parts of the ad tech market, but then refused to order a divestiture.

In a separate case, Judge Amit Mehta similarly found that Google had operated an illegal search monopoly, then declined to make Google sell Chrome. 

On this side of the Atlantic, the Commission has been left to grapple with the implications of both cases.

Ribera said a decision on possible remedies in Google’s advertising case would come in the next few months and would rest on “our own capacities, assessments, and the compliance with our laws.”

As for the Google search monopolization case, which does not have as direct a parallel in the EU, the Commission has nonetheless explored data-sharing remedies under the Digital Markets Act that would echo measures sought by U.S. authorities.

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