EU top court upholds Google’s €4.1 billion Android fine

Europe’s top court has upheld Google’s roughly €4.1 billion Android fine, ending a long-running fight over whether the company used its mobile operating system to lock in its search business. The Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed the appeal on 2 July 2026 in Luxembourg and left the penalty intact, cementing one of the bloc’s biggest antitrust victories over a U.S. tech giant.

The case began when the European Commission opened antitrust proceedings in April 2015 and escalated them with a statement of objections in April 2016. In its 18 July 2018 decision, the Commission fined Google €4.34 billion, saying the company required phone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser to license the Play Store and also blocked manufacturers from using rival versions of Android. Brussels said those three restrictions helped Google use Android to reinforce the dominance of its search engine, at a time when about 80% of smart mobile devices in Europe and worldwide ran on Android.

The Commission ordered Google to stop the conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to 5% of Alphabet’s average daily worldwide turnover. Google took the case to the General Court, which largely sided with Brussels on 14 September 2022 but trimmed the fine to €4.125 billion. The EU’s top court has now confirmed that ruling in substance and upheld the fine at around €4.1 billion.

Google had argued that Android was open and that its licensing model supported innovation and choice. After the 2018 decision, the company said it had already changed its agreements to comply and insisted that Android had created more choice, not less. The Commission, for its part, stressed that the case did not question Android’s open-source model itself, only the restrictions attached to Google’s commercial agreements.

The ruling matters well beyond the size of the penalty. It leaves intact a legal precedent on how regulators can police app ecosystems, default settings and pre-installation deals, issues now central to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act and to U.S. debates over platform power. Americans who use Android devices depend on the same defaults and distribution channels that Brussels has now scrutinized, while U.S. regulators weighing their own cases can point to Europe’s willingness to treat bundling and self-preferencing as antitrust hazards.

Google’s European legal exposure is not over. Reuters has said the company has accumulated close to €11 billion in EU antitrust fines over the decades, and the bloc’s courts had already confirmed the separate €2.42 billion Google Shopping fine in 2024. The Android judgment closes one of the Commission’s most important Big Tech cases and leaves Europe with a template for challenging how dominant platforms bundle services and steer users.