On the Digital Markets Act, which is a regulatory law but works differently from traditional antitrust law — the fines are intended less to penalize a firm than to incentivize compliance. They also come with less of a sticker shock.
When the Commission started issuing multi-million euro fines under the DMA in 2025, to the opprobrium of some ‘Big Tech’ opponents, it pointed to the short duration of the conduct as one reason why the fines come far below the 10 percent of global turnover the regulation threatens. The most recent Google fine came in at a very modest 0.22 percent of the annual revenue of parent company Alphabet.
Though revenue is always considered a ceiling and enforcers always consider the same factors like how serious the infringement was, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the penalties are to some extent arbitrary — and not immune to political considerations.
The Google fine was actually the sum of two penalties (€460 million for Google’s favoring its own results in search, and €430 million for unfair practices in how the Play Store is installed on smartphones) that conveniently arrived just under the €1 billion mark in a moment of fraught transatlantic trade relations.
European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier denied that politics is part of the fining process. The EU “always follows due process,” he told POLITICO. Regnier said numerous objective criteria — the seriousness and length of the breach, mitigating factors and threshold keeping the penalties under a certain percentage of revenue — help “ensure that fines remain proportional under all circumstances.”
Penalties issued under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s landmark content moderation law, are also contested. Chinese e-commerce giant Temu has argued a Commission fine of €200 million levied against it in May is “disproportionate” — though it’s far below the DSA’s higher threshold for fines, which is 6 percent of the company’s annual global revenue.
