16JUL

Brussels keeps Google DMA replies sealed

2 min read

09:32UTC

The Commission's public consultation on Google's DMA Article 6(11) search-data obligation closed on Friday 1 May; Brussels has not published the submissions, citing Alphabet's right of reply.

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Key takeaway

Brussels has sealed the Google DMA submissions until the binding decision lands on 27 July.

The DMA.100209 public consultation on Google's search-data sharing obligation closed on Friday 1 May ¹. The European Commission has not published the submissions, citing Alphabet's right of reply. The consultation was opened on 16 April on the back of the preliminary measures the Commission served on Alphabet ; the binding decision is due Monday 27 July.

The sealed submissions are the only public window onto how rivals, advertisers and search-data clients argue the Article 6(11) interoperability test. Holding them back until Alphabet replies narrows what civil society and Brussels press can scrutinise before adoption. The 27 July ruling lands three days after the United States Trade Representative's Section 301 final determination on EU digital rules . The order in which those two outputs arrive, and what Washington says about tariff posture in between, is the political weather under which Brussels writes the EU's first cloud-AI gatekeeper remedy.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

One of the EU's rules for large tech companies (the Digital Markets Act) requires Google to share its search data with rival search engines and comparison services, so competitors can improve their products. A public consultation on exactly what data Google must share closed on 1 May 2026. Normally, the Commission publishes consultation responses so the public can see what companies and civil society said. In this case, it has not done so yet, citing Google's legal right to respond to any submissions before they are published. The binding decision on what Google must actually do is due on 27 July 2026. The sealed submissions mean no one outside the Commission currently knows the arguments Google has made in its defence, or what its rivals have demanded.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from Belgium and United Kingdom

Belgium

United Kingdom

Consensus view: EUI (European University Institute) Florence School of Regulation's Pier Luigi Parcu argues The Commission's decision to withhold consultation submissions on the basis of Alphabet's right-of-reply procedural guarantee is legally defensible under DMA Article 34, but sets a disclosure precedent that weakens the Act's credibility as a transparent enforcement regime: the same provision is available to Apple, Amazon, and Meta in their own open proceedings.

Counter-view: US Chamber of Commerce Europe's Marjorie Chorlins contends the sealed consultation is consistent with standard European administrative law and no different from the pre-publication phase of an OFCOM investigation in the UK, and that reading it as a threat to transparency reflects a misunderstanding of how EU administrative procedure works in adversarial enforcement contexts.

Key tension: Whether The Commission's procedural orthodoxy protects enforcement integrity or creates an opacity norm that enables companies to delay disclosure of compliance arguments for months after public consultation closes.

Sources:ASML·The Motley Fool·European Commission

Mentions:European Commission →Google →Digital Markets Act →Meta →United States →Section 301 →Alphabet →Washington →Apple →Amazon →European University Institute →DMA.100209 →USTR →

First Reported In

Update #4 · CISPE moves first; Brussels misses again

ASML· 7 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

DMA clock starts toward six-day AI Act collision

The DMA.100209 consultation closure on 1 May is the next procedural step after the Commission opened the Google search-data consultation on 16 April; the Commission's withholding of submissions advances the file toward the 27 July binding decision.

Occurred 16 Apr 2026

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This Event

Brussels keeps Google DMA replies sealed

The withheld responses are the only public window onto how Commission rivals and clients argue search-data interoperability before the binding decision lands on 27 July.

Different Perspectives

Trump administration

Washington defends the MATCH Act as closing a loophole that lets ASML's DUV tools reach Chinese fabs indirectly, dismissing the Dutch Cabinet's June complaint of being treated with disregard. Officials expect the bill's progress through Congress to keep the DUV cross-subsidy question live regardless of ASML's Q2 numbers.

Bruegel

Brussels-based economists argue this week's deliverables, specialist fab aid and a digital euro that restricts no US firm, prove Europe's sovereignty agenda advances only where it meets no American resistance. They expect the leading-edge fabrication gap and dependence on US frontier AI models to persist absent a policy that directly confronts a named US interest.

German federal government

Berlin welcomes the €659m tranche funding jobs across North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hesse and Bavaria, on top of the ESMC Dresden fab already under construction on TSMC-shipped tooling. Officials treat power and analogue capacity as the achievable near-term win while Dresden remains Germany's only bet on leading-edge logic.

House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee

The committee's 7 July report found the UK has "no coherent strategic framework" for sovereign technology and warns it "risks being cut off at whim", citing the June order that barred foreign access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as the trigger case. It expects no domestic hyperscaler or foundry response before the gap widens further.

European Commission

The Commission cleared €659m in German state aid on 14 July, taking cumulative Chips Act support to roughly €14.2bn, and let the digital-euro mandate reach trilogue after ECON's floor-vote shortcut was overturned. Brussels presents both as sovereignty delivered, without addressing that neither funds leading-edge logic fabrication.

ASML

ASML raised FY2026 guidance to €43-45bn on 15 July and, for the first time since Q1, dropped the export-control hedge from its release even with the MATCH Act live in Congress. Fouquet frames the order book, 86 systems against 67 in Q1, as strong enough to outrun the DUV dispute rather than evidence it has cooled.