European Commission

The Commission signed off a EUR890m Digital Markets Act fine against Google on 23 July, after the penalty had sat unsigned on President von der Leyen's desk for months while civil-society groups pushed for it to move. Signing landed four days before its own compliance Deadline lapsed, leaving it little room to be seen easing off.

The fine follows a separate order, a week earlier, requiring Google to open 11 Android features to rival AI providers. Taken together, the Commission is running two enforcement fronts on the same platform-rules file at once, a test of whether it can sustain both under direct external pressure.

Within 24 hours of its own Google fine, the Commission watched Washington escalate: a Section 301 trade probe into EU digital rules landed on 24 July, with tariffs threatened against Nokia, Airbus and Volkswagen if Brussels does not back down. The US trade representative had already called the fine a source of massive uncertainty for exporters the day before, so the probe reads as Washington converting rhetoric into a formal challenge aimed squarely at the Commission's own enforcement choice.

The retaliation tests the Commission's stated line, voiced through competition chief Teresa Ribera, that US pressure on its digital enforcement is not open to negotiation. Whether that line holds now depends on how FAR the Section 301 process is allowed to run.

The Commission's ban on new short-term Russian pipeline gas contracts took effect 17 June, but a long-term TurkStream exemption running to September 2027 keeps gas flowing to Hungary regardless. With Hungary's own court challenge lapsed and only Slovakia still contesting the ban at the Court of Justice, the Commission has faced no ruling forcing it to revisit that exemption.

On 27 July Slovakia said Brussels had signed a guarantee on a 2028 Russian gas phase-out, the condition on which it dropped its hold-out on the EU's sanctions package four days earlier. The Commission's own published record carries no confirmation of that signature, leaving Bratislava's account as, for now, the only public version of what was agreed.