On July 16, the European Commission issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act. This is the most consequential regulatory action in AI this year, and it deserves more than a news summary.
The two decisions are clean and specific. The order requires Google to open 11 Android features that assistants depend on, from voice activation to the ability to act across apps. Users will be able to summon a third-party assistant by voice, much like the "Hey Google" command, and let it carry out tasks on their behalf. And Google must share the anonymised query, click, ranking and view signals its search engine generates with competing providers.
What makes this order brutal is not the constraint itself, but what it targets. The stakes sit in distribution. The default, deeply integrated assistant on a phone captures users at the point of habit, and the ruling could reshuffle who holds that position across Europe's Android base. Google has built two of the three assets that make it nearly unbeatable in Europe: a default search position on billions of Android devices, and a proprietary dataset you can't replicate without equivalent market share.
The order leaves Google a lot of surface area to lose and almost no leverage to defend it. This opens the door for assistants such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, or Perplexity to plug into the same system-level hooks Gemini uses, rather than running as ordinary apps. Third-party AI assistants are currently limited in how they can offer their innovative services, making them less attractive to 60% of EU users who have an Android device. That gap just closed.
The timeline matters. The search-data measures phase in through 2026, with Google set to finalise pricing by January 2027, while the Android changes must ship in the next major release, Android 18, by August 2027. That's not tomorrow, but it's not far enough away to matter strategically. By the time competing assistants can actually reach users at the system level, the frontier model landscape will have shifted again.
The regulatory form is clean but the engineering question is thorny. These are specification decisions, binding measures that define, feature by feature, what compliance has to look like, rather than a financial penalty. They convert obligations Google already carried into concrete engineering requirements, and they follow roughly two years of talks that failed to produce workable remedies. Google now has to decide whether a third-party assistant can access the microphone, the home button, on-device user data, and the machinery that powers proactive suggestions. Neither Google's objections nor the Commission's assurances specify what technical eligibility requirements a third-party AI service must meet, or who bears liability if an approved service is compromised.
That ambiguity is the real enforcement lever. If the company falls short, the Commission can open a separate non-compliance case carrying penalties of up to 10% of annual worldwide revenue. Google will appeal, and designated gatekeepers cannot challenge DMA obligations in the abstract; they must comply while any appeal proceeds. So the company faces a choice: build the access, argue over the details, or expose itself to a non-compliance case it has to defend while the system is already live.
This is regulatory design with teeth. The EU isn't forcing Google to lose market share. It's forcing Google to compete the same way everyone else does: on the merits of the product, not the fact that it's baked into the OS. That's what makes it dangerous. For the first time, users in Europe can choose a different default without downgrading their phone.
If that works, the business model of frontier AI has to shift. A model's value starts with reach. Default placement on billions of devices is reach. Once that's gone, reach becomes something you have to earn.
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