Reviewing European Antitrust Activity in 2025 and What It All Means for 2026

Megan Kirkwood is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

In Brussels, 2025 started and ended on the same question: how far can the European Union push Big Tech to make meaningful change? The year began with a Financial Times report last January that the European Commission was reassessing antitrust investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) against Apple, Meta, and Google, raising concerns that the probes would be scaled back. While this reassessment did not publicly materialize, some expressed disappointment at the fines issued in April under the DMA. These amounted to €500 million for Apple and €200 million for Meta, though the Commission can ramp up fines if the companies are found to continue to flout the rules (so far, Meta has been cleared). Many speculated that the fines were kept low because Brussels was trying to avoid escalating tensions with United States President Donald Trump, whose administration threatened trade retaliation against the bloc if it continued antitrust action against US companies.

Despite such threats, the EU moved ahead with its investigation into Google’s adtech monopoly, issuing a €2.95 billion fine for abusing its dominance in the advertising sector. The Commission had threatened that it sees structural break up as the only effective solution, but it gave Google the chance to propose its own remedies, which unsurprisingly, stopped short of a break up. The Commission will now investigate the proposal and take reactions from 200 market participants, according to Politico. However, European Commission executive vice president Teresa Ribera reiterated that if the Commission finds the remedies inadequate “and the only way forward is to impose remedies, structural remedies, we will do it.”

Both the EU and the US still have yet to make final decisions in their respective Google adtech cases. In both instances, the agencies are pushing for structural break up. However, the US decision comes after what many antitrust experts regard as a disappointing decision in the United States v. Google LLC (2020) remedies trial, which followed a ruling that Google was a monopolist in search. Google faced a potential forced sale of its Chrome browser, which holds roughly a 70% market share globally, among other proposals brought by the Department of Justice, most of which ended up being dismissed by the Judge presiding over the trial. There is speculation that the outcome in the US adtech case may be similar, as the judge has already said the request to break up the company was “dramatic” and not as “easily enforceable” as the resolution Google has proposed, according to the Financial Times. Thus, it remains to be seen if the EU will maintain the political will to break up the company, or if the two jurisdictions will ultimately align on the issue.

However, the US made it clear that it does not wish to see other jurisdictions regulate its companies. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is pushing the EU to roll back tech regulation in exchange for a steel and aluminum deal, as well as guarantees from Big Tech to build more data centers in the bloc. Ribera, in charge of antitrust at the European Commission, told Politico that the US is using “blackmail” against the EU, reiterating that “the European digital rulebook is not up for negotiation.” Indeed, Ribera has held firm that the EU “must be prepared to walk away from a trade deal with the US if Donald Trump acts on his threats” and that “the bloc would not hold back in carrying out these investigations and enforcing its landmark digital regulation because of Trump’s threats,” according to the Financial Times. In December, the US Trade Representative announced that due to EU digital rules, the US may impose “fees or restrictions on foreign services,” even singling out specific European companies that could be targeted, such as Spotify. The announcement also said that the US “will take a similar approach to other countries that pursue an EU-style strategy in this area” in an attempt to dissuade the “Brussels Effect” from driving other countries that are considering digital rules. Such a landscape proves challenging for any hope of cross-jurisdictional collaboration on the matter.

In 2026, what significant action can we expect to see in the EU? Under the DMA, the Commission is investigating whether to expand the DMA to include cloud computing services and launching a new investigation into Google’s search policy, which may be harming publishers. In antitrust, the outcome of the Google adtech case is pending, as mentioned, alongside two new investigations discussed below.

WhatsApp and AI chatbots

On December 4, the Commission launched an investigation into Meta’s AI policy on WhatsApp as part of its ongoing monitoring of AI markets in the bloc. The investigation follows a consultation that launched in January 2024 and the publication of a policy paper in September 2024.

The Commission is investigating Meta's new policy, announced in October, which prohibits AI providers from using the WhatsApp business solution to talk with other chatbots, like ChatGPT. The service is intended for businesses to offer customer service support, which will not be affected by the policy change. However, the Commission is concerned that the new policy could “prevent third party AI providers from offering their services through WhatsApp” in the EU, while Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, would remain available. Following the policy change, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they would remove their chatbots from WhatsApp.

This appears to be an example of a potential ecosystem advantage, whereby Meta can leverage its control of a dominant gateway. When it comes to messaging apps, WhatsApp has a market share of over 90% in some European countries and can use its dominance to boost its other services, in this case its own chatbot. Leveraging distribution advantages is one of the key concerns when considering market concentration of AI services, an important consideration as European use of chatbots like ChatGPT has seen explosive growth, potentially becoming the dominant way that users access information.

Ribera told the Financial Times that the Commission “could take early action” to stay ahead of the policy change, which takes effect this month. According to a Commission report, interim measures can be introduced to “stop a certain behavior while the antitrust investigation is ongoing,” which Ribera suggested may be used here “to ensure that this does not blow up the possibility to ensure proper enforcement of the law.” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tamlin Bason said the EU is likely seeking “a quick settlement” in this case, “bypassing the uncertainty of a multiyear court battle.” The investigation will cover the entirety of the EU, excluding Italy, which first brought its own investigation into the matter. (Notably, Brazil launched its own probe just before the Commission, highlighting significant global interest in the matter.)

Meta has otherwise scored a couple of wins in antitrust cases on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Meta was found to be non-compliant with the DMA over its “pay or consent” policy which offered users the choice of either paying a monthly subscription fee for an ad-free version of its social media platforms or continuing to use its platforms for free but agreeing to personalized ads. This was introduced to meet obligations that mandated Meta offer users the opportunity to decline data combination while still having access to a less personalized but equivalent alternative. The Commission took issue with this binary offering, arguing it did not meet the obligations of the law. Meta now offers a third choice—a free service with unskippable, less personalized ads—which seems to have satisfied the Commission.

In the US, Meta successfully argued that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking in response to a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, despite buying competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram, and blocking competitors from accessing user social graphs, essentially locking in users. As noted by the Tech Justice Law Project’s Madeline Batt and Melodi Dinçer in their November tech litigation roundup for Tech Policy Press, after the outcome in the Google Search case, both results have cast serious doubt on the ability for antitrust litigation to have an impact in tech’s fast moving markets. Matt Stoller, research director for the American Economic Liberties Project, suggested the issue was partly a framing issue, with too much focus on technical market definition and not enough on Meta’s wider social impact. Stoller questions why the FTC case wasn’t brought under merger law. Either way, the outcome arguably places even more pressure on Europe to enforce its rules.

Google 'AI Overviews' and data advantages

The European Commission also opened an investigation into Google to assess whether the company has breached competition rules by using the content of web publishers for its AI Overviews based on unfair terms, as well as exclusively using content uploaded on YouTube, which Google owns, for artificial intelligence training purposes.

The Commission is concerned that web publisher content used to provide generative responses on Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode is not obtained fairly, as publishers are not offered a real choice to opt out, nor are they compensated. Publishers essentially have to choose whether to appear in Google Search results and be opted into AI Overviews, or attempt to opt out, which will mean they are also not included in search results. This is particularly troubling since Google maintains an almost 90% global market share for search, meaning that opting out of Google Search essentially kills the possibility of end users finding your webpage. Research by the analytics firm Authoritas signals the “devastating impact” of AI summaries on publishers, finding that overviews have “caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs.”

The research by Authoritas was commissioned by the non-profit Foxglove, which launched a complaint to UK and European competition authorities along with the Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web, with support from the antitrust law firm Preiskel and Co. Separately, the European Publishers Council filed a complaint to the Commission last year, arguing that Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode “rely heavily on high-quality journalistic content, yet publishers are offered neither meaningful choice nor fair remuneration for that use.”

While sites can implement the robot.txt protocol to resist AI crawlers, it’s not enough, according to some experts. Audrey Hingle and Mallory Knodel wrote in Tech Policy Press that robot.txt in its current form is only voluntary and cannot express a preference for a website to be indexed for search results but not for AI training. Google maintains a list of robot directives publishers can adopt to express their preferences; however, these only go so far as to block the display of “snippets” of content, with none allowing for search inclusion and overview exclusion of entire pages.

The Commission is also concerned that content uploaded on YouTube is being used to train Google's generative AI models without appropriate compensation to creators or allowing them to refuse such use of their content. The Commission writes that “content creators uploading videos on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, including for training generative AI models.” Thus, in a similar way to publishers, creators are given a choice to either participate on a platform that holds significant market share, giving over data that may be used to replace their work product, or opt out of platform participation entirely.

The Commission argues that Google does not allow rival developers of AI models to use YouTube content to train their AI models, which may put competitors at a competitive disadvantage. Currently, Google’s policy states that third party data sharing is turned off by default, but creators can opt into sharing and select which companies to share with. Though separate from this investigation, it is significant to note that in 2024, it was revealed by the New York Times that “an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos” in an apparent violation of the platform’s policies. The investigation also found Google doing the same thing despite potentially committing copyright infringement.

The investigation has now been launched as “as a matter of priority,” though there is no deadline to bring it to an end. It also comes after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority designated Google under its own digital competition regime, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. One of the current proposed remedies similarly seeks to give publishers more control over their online published content and how it is collected for search or used in AI-generated responses in AI overviews or Gemini. Thus, the new investigation opens up the possibility for cross-jurisdictional coordination and information sharing. This, however, will depend on whether the UK pursues the remedy, which is still under discussion and could be swayed by ongoing disagreement regarding changes to the country’s copyright law. However, information sharing could help to speed up the investigation, and cross-jurisdictional alignment would place greater pressure on the tech giant to comply with obligations.

Closing thoughts

Overall, the EU enters the new year with a considerable batch of investigations using both traditional competition law as well as the newer DMA. With a decision on whether or not the EU will break Google’s adtech business apart looming, its enormity should not be understated. Breaking apart the adtech monopoly could give alternative ad exchanges, buying and selling tools more room to compete and offer better prices to both advertisers and publishers. Without a monopoly mediating the exchange, the power to squeeze both sides would likely be reduced significantly. Equally, giving publishers the choice on how their content is used, with the ability to opt out of AI Overviews that decimate their web traffic, also offers a fundamental shift in the current power dynamics of digital ecosystems.

Regarding the DMA, the decision on whether cloud computing will come under the law could be significant for helping business and end users potentially switch away from the giants. Smaller wins could see alternative chatbots be able to reach end users on a dominant service like WhatsApp. But material changes to the digital economy will be minimal if efforts do not focus on weakening the power of digital monopolists and helping users to switch to alternatives.