Google

The European Commission fined Google €890m on 23 July, split €460m for favouring its own shopping and travel results in Search and €430m for blocking cheaper Play Store deals; Google has 60 days to comply . The fine had sat unsigned on Ursula von der Leyen's desk for months after more than 30 civil-society groups protested the delay.

It landed a week after the Commission ordered Google to open 11 Android features to rival AI providers for free and share anonymised Search ranking data with competitors from January 2027 . By early August Google had lodged no appeal against the fine.

Donald Trump ordered a Section 301 trade investigation into EU digital rules on 24 July, a day after the Commission's €890m Google fine, and said the US is "not a piggybank for Europe" . Coverage named Nokia, Airbus and Volkswagen as possible further tariff targets, spreading the exposure beyond Google itself.

The threat followed the same pattern that had delayed the fine for months: Washington's warnings that aggressive EU digital enforcement threatens the transatlantic trade framework. By 4 August the Section 301 probe had produced no formal filing.

Alphabet employed 198,933 people on 30 June 2026, up 11,830 year on year, its fourth consecutive quarterly rise, while Google Cloud revenue grew 82% to $24.8bn over the same period . Alphabet also raised its 2026 capital-spending guidance to $195-205bn at its 22 July results, up from $180-190bn set only three months earlier, though shares still fell over 4% on the call .

That run sits against a wider fortnight of AI-linked cuts elsewhere in the sector. Google will not say which teams inside Alphabet are actually growing, leaving the capex and Cloud growth figures to carry most of the explaining.