Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director of competition, said the company was contesting orders that would require it to share private search histories without sufficient anonymisation and weaken important Android security protections. He said searches can contain deeply personal material, including medical worries and relationship concerns, and warned that inadequate safeguards could cause “irreversible harm” to user privacy.
Google filed appeals on 29 September 2026 at the EU General Court in Luxembourg, which hears challenges to European Commission decisions. The company is seeking to overturn two binding Commission orders issued in July 2026 under the Digital Markets Act.
The dispute is a test of how far the EU can push interoperability and data-sharing requirements into a platform’s core services. It centres on Google’s market dominance and control of data, while Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is designated as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act.
One order requires Google to open Android to other artificial intelligence software providers. The Commission said this would give competing AI assistants access to functions currently available to Google’s Gemini service, including the ability for a user to activate a rival assistant by voice or have it perform tasks inside other apps.
The second order requires Google to provide rival search engines with access to search data. Google said in its appeal that the Commission’s demands would undermine privacy safeguards and create security risks for European users.
The Commission said its measures contain safeguards for privacy, device integrity and security. DuckDuckGo supported the EU’s position, saying the anonymisation framework was robust.
Google has warned of “irreversible harm” from the data-sharing order. Its legal challenge comes after the Commission fined the company €890 million in July, including €460 million for favouring its own services in search results and €430 million for limiting the way app developers could direct users to cheaper alternatives outside Google Play.
Google faces a January 2027 deadline to share search data and a July 2027 deadline for the Android changes. Companies that fail to comply with the Digital Markets Act can face fines of up to 10% of annual global revenue. Repeat offences can bring fines of up to 20% of global annual revenue, alongside periodic penalty payments.
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