Europe’s top competition authority has moved to strip Google of its iron grip on online search data, ordering the company to open up the information it collects to rival search engines and artificial intelligence services.
the The European Commission developed the plan on Thursdayand send a set of initial results to Google under the Digital Markets Act.
Under the proposal, Google would have to allow third-party search engines to access data it collects on rankings, user queries, clicks and page views.
The company will have to provide 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 opportunity to improve Google’s control of the search market and ultimately challenge it.
Teresa Ribera, who serves as Executive Vice President of Clean, Fair and Competitive Transition, explained the idea behind the move.
“Data is a key input for online research and for developing new services, including artificial intelligence,” she said. “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 tolerate practices that risk closing down markets or limiting choice.”
The proposal, published on April 16, 2026, covers six areas: Who is eligible to receive the data, including whether AI chatbots that perform search functions number; What data is shared? How and how often is it delivered? Steps to protect the privacy of personal data; How pricing will work; and access management rules.
Google pushes back on privacy concerns
The decision to include AI chatbots is a clear sign that Brussels sees these tools as a direct competitor to traditional search.
Google has spent decades building a storehouse of user behavior data that no competitor has been able to match. This stock is now at the center of a major legal battle.
Google was formally accused in March 2025 of the breach Digital Markets Law. Since then, the company has strongly opposed the latest proposals.
Claire Kelly, Google’s chief competition advisor, said the company would challenge these measures, describing them as going far beyond what the law was supposed to require.
“Hundreds of millions of Europeans trust Google with their most sensitive searches, including private questions about their health, families and finances, and the Commission’s proposal would force us to hand over this data to third parties, with dangerously ineffective privacy protections,” Kelly said.
The company also accused some of the pressure behind the investigation of coming from competitors looking to grab its data, and warned that proposed privacy protections would not hold up.
Fines and a final deadline loom
The results released Thursday fall roughly halfway through the formal process that the commission began on Jan. 27, 2026.
This process is designed to clarify exactly how a company must meet its legal obligations, rather than jumping straight to a penalty ruling. However, the risks are still serious.
If Google fails to meet any final requirements set, it could face fines of up to ten percent of Alphabet’s total global revenue for a year, a figure that could reach $35 billion.
This push is happening at a “defining moment of increasing interconnectedness with AI services,” Hina Virkkonen, executive vice president for technical sovereignty, security and democracy, said in the white paper.
The public consultation period begins on Friday 17 April 2026, and anyone who wants to have their say has until 1 May to do so. The committee plans to issue a final and 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 up its most closely guarded assets.
If successful, the result could serve as a model for how governments elsewhere choose to deal with the crisis The huge data advantages of big AI and Internet companies.
A July deadline will show whether the rules favor those who hold vast stores of data or those who have new ideas but no data of their own.
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