The European Commission opened its public consultation on 16 April 2026, setting out proposed DMA measures requiring Alphabet to share anonymised search ranking, query, click and view data with rival search engines on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. The consultation is filed under reference DMA.100209 and closes on 1 May 2026, with a binding decision expected by 27 July 2026. A parallel consultation on Android interoperability with third-party AI services, filed as DMA.100220, runs alongside. The measures are drawn from DMA Article 6(11), the gatekeeper obligation on data portability for search services.
Six days after the 27 July binding decision, the EU AI Act AI Office gains full enforcement powers over GPAI model providers. DG COMP runs the DMA case; DG CNECT runs the AI Act; each deadline was set on its own procedural clock. The General Court appeal window on any DMA remedy, if Alphabet appeals, would open after GPAI enforcement is already live. That creates a fortnight in which a gatekeeper remedy, a first-instance enforcement activation and a likely appeals filing land against each other with no published Commission-level pipeline.
Google holds around 90 per cent of EU search market share, and rivals have had no access to its ranking signals under a binding order until now. Qwant, Ecosia, Bing and AI search products stand to receive the first pan-EU FRAND access to anonymised ranking data if the 27 July decision lands as consulted. The architectural effect on AI search, in particular, depends on how "anonymised" is defined in the binding text: granular enough to train competitive retrieval systems, or aggregated enough to preserve Alphabet's ranking moat. That definition is what the 1 May consultation close will determine.
On the AI Act side, no pre-enforcement guidance letters from the AI Office to GPAI providers before the 2 August activation date have surfaced in public sources. Public absence does not rule out internal guidance; Commission staff correspondence may exist without a press trail. What is on record is that the Commission has not published a framework connecting the DMA remedy to GPAI enforcement, and providers are preparing for a fine ceiling of 3 per cent of global turnover without procedural clarity on voluntary compliance. Pre-enforcement complaints are the likeliest route by which the coordination gap becomes visible between 1 May and 2 August.
