Google has lost its appeal against a €4.1 billion fine — the largest ever imposed by the European Commission against the company — after Europe’s top court dismissed the tech giant’s challenge and confirmed the penalty stands.
The original fine of €4.3 billion was handed down by the European Commission in 2018, reduced marginally to €4.1 billion in 2022. Google’s subsequent legal appeal has now been rejected in full. The case centred on how Google used its Android mobile operating system to entrench its dominance of online search and browsing at the expense of competitors.
A Google spokesperson said the judgement “fails to recognise” the company’s “significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” adding that the company had already adapted its agreements to comply with the original decision in 2018 and remains focused on “continued innovation and openness.”
What Google Was Found to Have Done
The European Commission identified three specific practices through which Google had behaved illegally. First, it required manufacturers of Android smartphones and tablets to pre-install Google Search and Google Chrome as a condition of allowing access to the Play Store — the dominant app marketplace on Android devices. Second, it made payments to large manufacturers and mobile network operators that agreed to pre-install Google Search exclusively on their devices. Third, it prevented manufacturers from selling devices powered by alternative “forked” versions of Android by threatening to deny them permission to pre-install Google’s apps.
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Regulators acknowledged that Google’s version of Android does not technically prevent device owners from downloading alternative browsers or switching search engines — but found that the structural conditions Google imposed on manufacturers effectively foreclosed genuine competition before users ever opened a device for the first time.
When the original fine was announced in 2018, then-CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that the decision “rejects the business model that supports Android, which has created more choice for everyone, not less.” That argument has now been definitively rejected by Europe’s highest court.
A Pattern of Competition Penalties
The Android case is far from an isolated episode in Google’s relationship with European regulators. In September 2024, the European Court upheld a separate €2.4 billion fine for the company’s abuse of its shopping-comparison service. In September 2025, Google was fined a further €2.95 billion for breaching competition laws by favouring its own products in online advertising display, to the detriment of rivals.
The three penalties together total more than €9.5 billion — a figure that underscores how systematic European regulators believe Google’s anticompetitive behaviour has been across different sectors of its business.
The largest fine ever technically imposed against Google remains a Russian court’s 2024 judgment over the restriction of Russian state media channels on YouTube — set at two undecillion roubles, a figure exceeding the world’s total GDP. That case and the European penalties occupy very different legal and political universes, but the Android ruling remains the most significant and commercially consequential competition penalty Google has faced from a credible regulatory authority.
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