Google’s rivals line up for damages after landmark EU fine

Google’s rivals line up for damages after landmark EU fine

The bloc’s first Digital Markets Act penalty is worth far more to competitors as courtroom leverage than as a cheque to Brussels.

July 28, 2026 – 7:32 am
Image by: Shutterstock

Less than a week after Brussels handed Google its first Digital Markets Act penalty, the company’s competitors are already turning the ruling into ammunition. The European Commission fined Google €890 million on 23 July, roughly $1 billion at current rates, and rivals who have spent years chasing the search giant through European courts now see the infringement finding as fresh leverage in a fast-growing pile of private damages claims.

The fine itself splits into €460 million for favouring Google’s own shopping results over those of competitors and €430 million for stopping app developers from steering users away from Google Play. It was the penalty Brussels had spent months preparing, and it lands on a company already carrying a record €4.1 billion Android fine and more than €10 billion in earlier European antitrust penalties.

The Impact of the EU Decision

What makes the decision valuable to rivals is not the money going to Brussels but the precedent going into their own cases. Under EU rules, a Commission infringement finding can underpin follow-on damages actions, allowing claimants to argue that liability is effectively settled and then fight only over how much they are owed.

Lawyers expect the ruling to reinforce claims already grinding through national courts, and Thomas Hoppner of Geradin Partners, a firm that has acted for several of the complainants, predicted it would “trigger a new wave of litigation.” The value lies in scale as much as substance, since a claimant no longer has to prove that Google broke the rules before it can argue about the cost.

Existing and Upcoming Cases

Several of those cases are well advanced:

• In Germany, Idealo won €465 million from a Berlin court in November, in a claim rooted in Google’s search self-preferencing.
• Sweden’s PriceRunner, owned by Klarna, secured an even larger award this month when a Stockholm court ordered Google to pay around $1.5 billion, or close to $1.97 billion once interest is added. Google is expected to appeal, and the case could run for more than another year.
• Other pending cases include those from Italy’s Moltiply (seeking €2.97 billion) and the Netherlands, where two groups backed by the litigation funder LitFin are pursuing more than $1 billion between them.

Most of these actions trace back to the Commission’s 2017 Google Shopping decision, a €2.42 billion penalty that first established the self-preferencing pattern the new DMA finding now echoes.

Google’s Legal Challenge

The clearest sign of how much the ruling matters is Google’s effort to keep it out of court. Before the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, where Kelkoo, Foundem, and Connexity are pursuing a multibillion-pound claim, Google has asked judges to exclude the DMA decision from the evidence, arguing that the regulation rests on a different legal framework from the competition-law claims at issue. The company says the finding is both inadmissible and irrelevant.