Two orders, one court
Google filed appeals at the EU General Court in Luxembourg on Monday against two decisions the European Commission issued in July under the Digital Markets Act, Reuters reported.
The first requires Google to make anonymised Search data available to eligible rival search engines and AI chatbots. The second covers access to 11 Android features that are currently available more extensively to Google’s own services than to anyone else’s.
Taken together they are the Commission’s answer to a specific complaint: that a company which already holds the search index and the mobile operating system is unusually well placed to win the assistant market on top of both.
Google’s argument is privacy, not competition
Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director for competition, framed the appeal around users rather than rivals. “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.
The company went further on the search-data order specifically, arguing that people use Search “for their most personal questions — from medical worries to close relationships” and that mandating disclosure of those queries without adequate safeguards “would cause irreversible harm.”
The Commission disagrees on the facts. It says both measures contain “robust safeguards protecting the privacy of users, device integrity and security.”
That is the whole dispute in two sentences. Neither side is arguing about whether the data would help competitors — it obviously would. They are arguing about whether anonymisation at that scale is possible.
The clock keeps running
Filing an appeal does not suspend the orders. The Commission’s timetable still requires Google to finalise the anonymised Search dataset by November 2026 and its pricing offer by January 2027, with the search-data obligation taking effect that month and the Android changes due by July 2027.
The General Court routinely takes years over DMA and competition appeals. Unless Google wins interim relief, the practical outcome is that it complies while it litigates, and the dataset exists before the court rules on whether it should.
Why AI chatbots are in a search remedy at all
The inclusion of AI chatbots as eligible recipients of Search data is the part that makes this an AI story rather than a search one. A chatbot that can ground answers in a live index of the web is a substitute for search; one that cannot is not.
Britain’s competition regulator reached a similar conclusion from a different direction last week, proposing that ChatGPT and Perplexity appear on the choice screen Google must show Android users. Two regulators, two instruments, one premise: the assistant market and the search market are the same market.
What to watch is whether Google seeks interim measures. Without them, the November deadline arrives long before the judgment.
