On July 23, 2026, the European Commission fined Google €890 million for breaching the Digital Markets Act. It is the largest penalty the DMA has produced so far, and the first against Google under that law. It is also, strictly speaking, not an adtech decision. Nothing in either infringement finding touches Google Ad Manager, AdX, or the DSP business. Adtech and martech teams should still read it closely, because it shows how the DMA behaves once the Commission stops consulting and starts enforcing, and several of the law’s obligations do apply directly to Google’s advertising services.

What the Commission Actually Decided

The €890 million is two decisions, not one. According to the Commission’s announcement, €460 million covers self-preferencing in Google Search: Google showed its own shopping, hotel, transport, and sports results more prominently, with richer visuals and filters, than comparable third-party services. The remaining €430 million covers anti-steering restrictions on Google Play, where app developers were prevented from freely telling users about cheaper offers outside the store and were charged steering-related fees the Commission found non-compliant.

Google was given 60 days to end both practices, a deadline that fell on September 21, 2026. Missing it exposes the company to periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover. Google said publicly that it disagreed and was weighing an appeal, but an appeal does not pause the compliance clock. On September 8, 2026, Google rolled out a redesigned results page across the EU for flight, hotel, and restaurant queries. It separates units for third-party aggregators from units for direct suppliers and strips out features such as live pricing and date filters. Google described the change as a serious drop in search quality. The Commission’s position is that European consumers should choose whether to go through intermediaries.

For comparison, the previous DMA fines, issued in April 2025, were €500 million against Apple and €200 million against Meta. The Google number is larger than either, and it arrived as two separate findings, each with its own remedy order.

Why This Is Not the Ad Tech Case

Keeping the dockets straight matters, because they are regularly blurred together. Google’s adtech business in Europe is being handled under ordinary competition law, not the DMA. On September 5, 2025, the Commission fined Google €2.95 billion under Article 102 of the Treaty (case AT.40670) for abusing dominant positions in publisher ad serving and programmatic buying, citing mechanisms such as First Look, Last Look, and Unified Pricing Rules that favoured AdX. The Commission said at the time that only a structural remedy might resolve the conflicts of interest. Google answered with behavioural proposals, including floor-price and interoperability changes, meant to avoid a forced divestiture. The public version of that decision was released in January 2026, and the fine is under appeal.

In the United States, the DOJ’s adtech case reached its remedy ruling in early September 2026. The court rejected the government’s request to divest AdX and ordered behavioural remedies instead, including interoperability obligations. So by late 2026, the two major adtech proceedings have both stopped short of a breakup, at least for now. The DMA fine runs on a separate track with a different legal test. Under the DMA, the Commission does not need to prove dominance or harm to competition in a defined market. It only needs to show that a designated gatekeeper failed to meet an obligation written into the regulation.

That difference in the legal test is the reason the July decision matters for advertising.

The DMA Obligations That Do Cover Advertising

When the Commission designated Alphabet as a gatekeeper in 2023, the core platform services on the list included Google’s online advertising services, not just Search, Play, Chrome, and Android. That brings a set of advertising-specific obligations into scope:

  • Price and fee transparency for advertisers and publishers. On request, gatekeepers must give advertisers daily information on the price paid, the fees taken, and the remuneration paid to the publisher. Publishers get the equivalent view from their side.
  • Access to measurement tools and data. Advertisers and publishers, and third parties they authorise, must be given free access to the gatekeeper’s performance-measuring tools and to the data needed to run their own verification of ad inventory.
  • Limits on combining personal data. Personal data from core platform services cannot be combined with data from other services for ad purposes without valid consent.

None of these was part of the July decision. What the decision does show is that the Commission is willing to test compliance reports against how products actually work, to split a case into separate infringement findings, and to set hard remedy deadlines with no pause for appeal. Those are the same tools it would use if it found Google’s ad-fee disclosures or measurement access falling short.

What Compliance Teams Should Plan For in 2027

For anyone buying or selling through a gatekeeper’s ad services in Europe, several practical points follow.

Use the transparency rights you already have. The DMA’s fee and price disclosure obligations exist whether or not anyone asks for the data. Agencies and publishers that request daily fee and remuneration data, and keep records of what comes back, are building the evidence file any future enforcement action would draw on. Buyers who never ask give the Commission nothing to compare against.

Expect product changes to arrive on short notice. Google’s September search redesign went from decision to rollout in less than seven weeks. If a future finding touches ad products, changes to auction mechanics, reporting, or data access could land on a similar timeline. Contracts and measurement setups that assume today’s Google Ads or Ad Manager behaviour will stay fixed through 2027 are a risk.

Watch search-adjacent ad formats now. The Search remedy already affects commercial surfaces. Shopping units, hotel and travel modules, and the traffic flowing to comparison and booking sites are all being rearranged in the EU. Performance teams running travel, retail, or local campaigns in Europe should expect shifts in click volume and cost between Google’s own units, aggregators, and paid placements, and should measure those shifts rather than assume them.

Keep antitrust and DMA exposure separate in planning. The Article 102 adtech case is about remedies for past conduct and could still end in structural changes. The DMA is about ongoing obligations that run for as long as the designation stands. Legal and procurement teams that treat them as one “Google in Europe” risk will misjudge both the timing and the kind of change each could force.

The July fine was aimed at hotel carousels and app-store links, not auction logic. Its message for adtech is about process: the Commission now enforces the DMA with specific findings, short deadlines, and penalties that keep running during an appeal. The advertising obligations in the same regulation are already in force. Teams that start requesting fee data, recording what platforms disclose, and building contingencies for sudden product changes will be ready if 2027 brings the first DMA case aimed at the ad stack.