Google Sues EU to Block DMA Order Opening Android to AI Rivals

Google has asked the EU's General Court in Luxembourg to strike down two Digital Markets Act orders that would force it to open Android to rival AI assistants and share search-and-click data with competing chatbots and engines, Bloomberg reported.

The Commission issued the orders in July. One would require Google to give rival AI assistants the same access as Gemini to 11 Android phone features, including voice activation and the ability to perform actions within apps, with the changes due by August 2027. The other, starting January 2027, would compel Google to share anonymised data about what users search for and click on with competing search engines and AI chatbots.

Oliver Bethell, Google's senior director for competition, framed the case as a privacy fight. "We're appealing decisions that will force us to share people's private search history without sufficient anonymisation and weaken vital security protections on Android," he said, per Euronews. Bethell added that mandating Google hand over personal search queries "without adequate safeguards would cause irreversible harm to user privacy."

The Commission says the measures include protections for users' privacy and device security, that search data would be anonymised before being shared, and that Google could assess whether a recipient posed serious security or data-protection risks. DuckDuckGo has sided with the regulator.

The filings add to a busy regulation beat this quarter and to a run of Google coverage that already includes this week's migration of Gemini Gems to a paywalled Skills tier.