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European Tech Sovereignty
10JUN

Brussels keeps Google DMA replies sealed

2 min read
10:31UTC

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.

Sources:European Commission·Euronews·Agence Europe
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

European Commission· 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
Read story →
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
European cloud and open-source industry
European cloud and open-source industry
European cloud providers gain a binding procurement mandate from CADA, confirmed by Gartner's $12.6bn sovereign-cloud figure for 2026. The $40bn Pax Silica commitment signals Brussels will not extend sovereignty discipline to the silicon layer, and the missing €350m Sovereign Tech Fund leaves open-source maintenance infrastructure unfunded beneath those same clouds.
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Science Secretary Kendall's £1.1bn Hardware Plan on 8 June chose demand-side instruments, advancing £150m to British chip startups via the British Business Bank, where Brussels chose supply-side alliance membership. Britain joined Pax Silica before the EU and has no collective EU procurement leverage; the Hardware Plan is the bilateral answer to the same silicon gap.
United States
United States
Pax Silica, a State Department initiative launched in December 2025, secured EU membership the same afternoon Brussels adopted its cloud sovereignty law. Ambassador Puzder had named CADA a red line against the EU-US trade framework; the narrowed CADA scope and the $40bn chip commitment together represent the settlement Washington sought.
France
France
France was the only EU state to oppose Pax Silica accession at COREPER on 3 June, asking the Commission to clarify the Council's steering role inside the alliance. Paris backed CADA and hosts Mistral AI; a $40bn US-chip commitment contractually narrows the commercial space for the sovereign AI model that France is trying to scale.
European Commission
European Commission
Von der Leyen framed CADA on 3 June as keeping 'most of our market open to like-minded partners', and the Commission's EVP Virkkunen simultaneously required majority-European ownership for the €4.12bn AI Gigafactories call. Brussels is managing rather than resolving the silicon dependency by asserting regulatory control at the cloud layer while formalising the chip relationship through Pax Silica.
European Central Bank
European Central Bank
The ECB's digital euro pilot drew more than 50 PSP applications and is naming 10 to 30 participants in July, advancing on its own monetary mandate without requiring a Commission act. Its trajectory this week is the inverse of CAIDA's: the sovereignty instrument that restricts no US firm is the only one keeping its published calendar.