The European Commission adopted two specification decisions under Article 6(7) of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brussels' standing conduct regime for the handful of platforms it has designated as gatekeepers, on Thursday 16 July, ordering Google to give third-party artificial intelligence (AI) providers free and effective interoperability with 11 defined Android features, and to share anonymised Google Search ranking data with rival search engines and AI chatbots on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms from January 2027.1 The Android obligations bite mostly at the next major release of the operating system, and by 1 August 2027 at the latest.
Under the DMA, a specification decision and a non-compliance decision do different work. The second punishes conduct that has already happened, is quantified in euros, and is discharged when the money is paid. The first writes down what compliance must look like going forward, feature by feature and dataset by dataset, and stays in force until the Commission revises it. Brussels adopted both instruments against the same company inside eight days, which is why the more consequential of the two was largely lost in coverage of the more expensive one.
A General Court ruling on 9 July had already closed Google's route to challenging the specifications before they took effect, leaving the company to comply first and litigate afterwards. That sequencing matters for the January 2027 date: an appeal can run alongside the obligation rather than suspending it.
Ecosia, the German non-profit search engine, and the French engine Qwant have jointly founded the European Search Perspective foundation to build an independent European ranking algorithm, and Ecosia says the mandated data access is what moves it "from answering two-thirds of queries to 100 percent".2 Neither has called the remedy adequate. The contrast with Europe's legislative track is stark: the EU's own sovereignty package slipped a third time under American trade pressure in May, while a competition instrument already on the statute book handed ranking data to the two European engines that had been asking for it.
