
The larger fine covers Google’s self-preferencing in search, where the European Commission found Google gives its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results better placement than it gives competitors. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
Brussels orders U.S. search giant to overhaul how it ranks rivals in search results and how it polices its app store — or face further penalties.
BRUSSELS — The EU fined Google €890 million on Thursday and ordered the U.S. internet giant to overhaul how it ranks rivals in search results and how it polices its app store, as it concluded two investigations into whether the company had breached the bloc’s flagship Big Tech law.
Google becomes the third company to face significant fines under the EU’s three-year-old Digital Markets Act, a rulebook meant to fast-track investigations into dominant tech platforms that has been denounced by Washington as discriminatory because most of the companies covered by it are American.
“Google has fallen short of effective compliance with the Digital Markets Act, and today we have taken decisive yet balanced enforcement action sanctioning these breaches,” said Teresa Ribera, the European Commission’s executive vice-president for competition policy. “The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine.”