Alphabet’s Google has taken two European Union antitrust orders to the bloc’s second-highest court, arguing they would force it to hand rivals access to user search data and Android features in ways that endanger privacy and security. Google filed the challenges Monday at the EU General Court in Luxembourg, according to Reuters. At stake is how far Brussels can push the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into the products underpinning Google’s search and Android businesses.
The two decisions, issued by the European Commission in July under the DMA, are specification orders, not fines or an infringement finding. One requires Google to help AI developers such as OpenAI access Android features currently available to its own Gemini assistant. The other orders Google to share search data with competing search engines. Reuters reported that “the changes will kick in next year.”
Google’s senior director of competition, Oliver Bethell, framed the appeal as a privacy fight. “We’re appealing decisions that will force us to share people’s private search history without sufficient anonymisation and weaken vital security protections on Android,” he said in a statement. “People use Search for their most personal questions, from medical worries to close relationships, and mandating we share these personal queries without adequate safeguards would cause irreversible harm to user privacy,” Bethell said.
The European Commission, which enforces the DMA, maintains that the two decisions already include strong safeguards for user privacy, device integrity and security. DuckDuckGo, a competing search engine that promotes its privacy practices, backed the Commission’s position. “The anonymization framework is robust and no amount of manufactured doubt changes that,” a DuckDuckGo spokesperson said. “The only thing an appeal buys Google is time.”
Bloomberg reported, in a story republished by The Irish Times, that the search-data mandate carries a January 2027 deadline and that Google must separately let users activate their preferred AI assistant by voice within twelve months. Those two dates sketch the real competitive stakes: rival search engines and AI assistants competing for EU queries would gain access to query-level signal that, per Bloomberg’s account, only Google currently collects at scale, and voice activation would let Android users summon a rival assistant instead of Gemini.
The appeal follows Google’s early-September move to publish licensing terms for rivals seeking its EU search data, a compliance step that now runs alongside the litigation challenging the underlying obligation. Filing at the General Court does not, on its own, establish that either deadline is paused; neither Reuters nor Bloomberg reported a suspension. DuckDuckGo’s own framing was blunter: in its telling, the litigation changes only the timing, not the outcome.
For search teams operating in the EU, the near-term move is to treat the January 2027 search-data access date and the twelve-month voice-activation deadline as live planning inputs rather than settled facts under appeal. Rival engines and AI assistants that gain access to Google-scale query data would be better positioned to close a data gap that has long shaped ranking and answer quality, so any team benchmarking against Google in Europe should track this case’s docket alongside the Commission’s original timeline.
Reuters (Foo Yun Chee) reported the filing on September 29, 2026, with additional detail from a Bloomberg report republished by The Irish Times the same day.
