The Zhitong Finance App learned that Google (GOOGL.US) raised objections to the EU's request that it open the Android operating system to artificial intelligence (AI) competitors and provide search data to competitive service providers. Google said on Tuesday that the company has filed an appeal with the European Union General Court of Justice in Luxembourg to challenge the relevant European Commission decision based on the Digital Market Act (DMA) on the grounds that the decision would damage user safety.
Oliver Bethel, Google's senior director of competition affairs, said: “People use search to ask the most intimate questions — from medical concerns to intimate relationships — and force us to share these personal inquiries without adequate safeguards, causing irreversible damage to users' privacy.”
In July of this year, the European Commission told Google that the company must allow users to enable their preferred AI assistant through voice commands and complete this adjustment within 12 months. The regulator also said that by January 2027, third-party search engines should have the same access to search data that only Google Search can currently collect on a large scale — especially for AI chatbots. The EU points out that currently AI agents not developed by Google cannot achieve the same operating capability as Gemini on Android.
Google Global Affairs President Kent Walker responded at the time that the new regulations may weaken user privacy protection because the review mechanism for third-party AI assistants has been weakened, data anonymity is insufficient, and there is no user consent, which may endanger business and national security.
The European Commission said the move aims to break the dominance of tech giants over the digital economy, ensure that Android devices and search engines have equal access to AI functions, and enhance service diversity. The committee's executive vice chairman, Henna Verkounen, said the hope is to spawn alternatives other than Google Search and Gemini to expand user choices.
Although this procedure has yet to reach the level of a formal infringement case, its purpose is to pressure Google to redesign the relevant services so that its technology complies with DMA requirements. The bill establishes a series of regulatory barriers designed to restrain Silicon Valley tech giants. However, up to now, most DMA-related decisions in the EU have been brought to court by large technology companies, and large technology companies want to further clarify how the law is applied. The regulation previously resulted in Google being fined $1 billion in another case. DMA has also infuriated US President Trump's administration, which believes the regulation discriminates against US companies.