Brussels has found a new way to punish success. Today, the European Commission fined Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) for two familiar business practices—featuring its own products and charging for customers its platform helps attract.
The Commission imposed €460 million for “self-preferencing,” or giving Google’s services prominent placement in search results, and €430 million for limiting how app developers direct users to cheaper offers outside Google Play.
Those nine-figure penalties reflect a broader shift in European competition policy. The DMA treats Google’s size and commercial success as evidence of an unfair imbalance that regulation must correct. The rest of the story turns on what Brussels means by “fair.”
The Crime of Stocking Your Own Shelves
Self-preferencing is a routine form of competition. Supermarkets place their house brands at eye level beside rival products. Mechanics sell the parts they install. Restaurants pour their own house wine. Amazon lists AmazonBasics products alongside competing brands. Digital storefronts such as Steam, the PlayStation Store, the Nintendo eShop, and Apple’s App Store take a share of the transactions they facilitate.
These practices can help consumers or harm them. The facts determine which.
Traditional competition law required the European Commission to show that self-preferencing excluded rivals and harmed consumers. It spent much of a decade trying to make that case in Google Shopping.
The DMA dispenses with that inquiry. Article 6(5) prohibits self-preferencing. Article 5(4) prohibits restrictions on “steering,” or directing users to offers outside a platform. The Commission need not show consumer harm, weigh efficiencies, or consider free-riding, which occurs when one business benefits from another’s investments without paying for them. Nor must it consider how the rule may weaken incentives to build new products or services.
The conduct is unlawful because a company the DMA designates as a gatekeeper engaged in it.
The Original Sin of Success
What changed was the yardstick. The DMA is less a conventional competition law than a redistribution regime built around its own definition of “fairness.” Traditional antitrust asks whether conduct harms competition and consumers. The DMA starts with the premise that large platforms possess too much bargaining power.
The European Commission’s own impact assessment makes that premise explicit. It describes gatekeepers’ “incomparable economic strength” as evidence that their relationships with business users are “imbalanced.” The document points to app stores that earned more than $83 billion in 2019, a social network that earned more than $70 billion, rising markups, and soaring post-pandemic stock valuations. Size and profitability appear less as evidence of commercial success than as proof of unfairness.
Many of the supposedly dependent firms are hardly helpless. Amazon, Microsoft, Epic Games, Samsung, Sony, and Booking.com rank among the world’s largest companies. The DMA nonetheless casts them as the weaker party when they deal with a designated gatekeeper.
With apologies to Hegel, one can call the mechanism “Dialectical Fairness.” The DMA seeks balance by weakening the stronger party and strengthening the weaker one. Because it treats the gatekeeper’s size, profitability, and bargaining power as the source of unfairness, reducing those advantages becomes part of the remedy.
Seen through that lens, the Google decisions make more sense. Featuring Google’s hotel results or flight prices is unfair because it may strengthen a company the DMA already regards as too powerful. Consumer benefits do not settle the question. They may deepen the problem if they draw more users to Google and make it still more profitable.
Under that theory, success converts ordinary business conduct into an offense.
Fairness by the Click
Consider what Google is accused of doing in Search. It gives users direct answers such as live football scores, hotel listings, and flight prices instead of sending them through a page of blue links. Under ordinary competition principles, that looks like winning on the merits by building a better product.
The Commission prefers a longer route. It wants Google to display more links to rival services, even when that makes Search slower or less useful, because those links redistribute traffic—and the advertising revenue that follows it.
That is the DMA’s version of fairness. It judges competition by who receives the click rather than whether users receive a good answer. A seamless product becomes suspect when its convenience strengthens the gatekeeper instead of its rivals.
I have written before about how this logic turns a law advertised as pro-competition into a mandate for fragmentation. Across the DMA’s enforcement record, users’ immediate interests—speed, convenience, and useful answers—receive little weight. The rules treat those benefits as a problem when they make Google’s product more attractive.
Brussels Knows a Fair Price When It Sees One
The self-preferencing decision quietly recasts Google as a quasi-public utility. In related compliance proceedings, the European Commission has said Google must weigh “the interests of all participants in the market,” including merchants, hotels, airlines, train operators, and rival search services. Trade associations had complained that changes to Search reduced their visibility.
Under that standard, Google becomes responsible whenever a product change costs another business traffic. A private company must protect its competitors’ commercial fortunes while improving its own service. Every change must leave merchants, intermediaries, and rivals at least as well off, even when users prefer the new product.
The Google Play decision reveals the same impulse. The Commission accepts that Google may charge an “initial acquisition” fee for connecting a developer with a new customer. It then declares Google’s fee too high.
That judgment turns the Commission into a price regulator. Markets usually determine whether a fee is sustainable. The DMA provides no benchmark for a lawful amount, no governing principle, and no answer to the obvious question: Too high compared with what?
The Commission simply knows an unfair price when it sees one.
When Winning Becomes the Violation
To be sure, digital platforms can harm consumers, and gatekeeper practices deserve scrutiny. The problem is that the DMA changes the question. Competition law asks whether conduct leaves consumers worse off. The DMA asks whether Google has gained too much and its rivals too little.
Once that becomes the test, the usual signs of competition—a better product, a cleaner interface, a market-tested fee, and billions of returning users—become evidence against the winner.
Competition policy once rewarded winning on the merits. The DMA now fines it.
