The European Commission has issued a binding corrective order requiring Google to open its Android operating system’s search data and default settings to AI search engines and conversational assistants, according to a report by Fortune. The decision is the first time Europe has written specific competition rules for search in the age of AI, and it cuts directly into Google’s control over the software on billions of devices.
The order, which the commission said was binding, covers two fronts. Google must give AI search engines access to the search data that flows through Android, and it must allow users and device makers to set AI assistants other than Google’s as the default on Android phones. The practical effect, if it stands, would be to put OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity and a field of smaller AI search players on equal footing with Google’s own Assistant and Gemini on the world’s most widely used mobile operating system.
Chinese media outlet 36Kr had flagged the action a day before the commission made it public, and the substance matches what Google’s rivals have been asking for. European regulators have spent years wrestling with Google’s dominance in search and mobile software, and the new order extends that fight into the fastest-growing corner of the industry, where the old rules of search competition no longer apply cleanly.
Android’s scale is the reason the order matters. The operating system runs on roughly three billion devices worldwide, and for most of them Google’s assistant and its search engine are the default experience, a position that has survived years of regulatory pressure. The commission’s order takes aim at exactly that arrangement, arguing that defaults and data access, not just market share, determine who wins in AI-era search.
For Google, the stakes are existential in a narrow sense. Its assistant and Gemini products depend on the distribution that Android provides, and its search engine depends on the data that flows through the platform. Opening both to competitors would, over time, erode the advantages that have made Google’s advertising machine the most profitable in the history of media.
The company is expected to appeal, and the fight could run for years. European competition cases have a rhythm of their own: the commission issues a decision, the company appeals, and the courts take their time. Google has fought similar battles over Android defaults since 2018, when the commission fined it billions of euros for tying its search and browser to the operating system, and the new order picks up where those fights left off.
The order is the latest turn in a decade-long confrontation. In 2018, the commission fined Google 4.34 billion euros, the largest penalty it has ever imposed on a single company, for requiring phone makers to pre-install Google Search and its browser as the price of using Android. In 2017 it fined the company 2.42 billion euros over its shopping service’s preferential treatment in search results. Google has appealed both, with mixed success, and the new order reads like the commission answering the question its earlier cases left open: what happens when the front door to the internet becomes an AI assistant?
The mechanics of compliance are where the fight will be won or lost. Opening search data to AI rivals means deciding what counts as search data, who gets it and under what conditions; the commission’s order is a directive, not a manual, and the details will be negotiated or litigated for years. The default-settings requirement is more concrete: Android already offers choice screens for browsers and search engines in some markets, and the order would extend that machinery to AI assistants, letting users pick their front door the way they pick a browser.
The order also signals how regulators are adapting to AI. The commission has said it wants to apply existing competition law to the new technology rather than wait for new legislation, and Thursday’s decision is the clearest example yet of that approach in action. AI assistants are becoming the front door to the internet, and European regulators have decided that whoever owns the front door cannot also be the only shop inside.
The order also lands as the industry is redefining what search even is. For twenty years, search meant typing a query into a box and getting a list of links. Today, a growing share of questions are answered by AI systems that summarize rather than link, and the advertising revenue that once flowed to search engines is starting to flow elsewhere. European regulators have concluded that the rules governing the old market should govern the new one too, a position that has drawn criticism from some legal scholars who argue the technology moves too fast for case-by-case intervention to keep up.
Google’s response will be watched closely, not least in Washington, where the company is fighting a separate antitrust case over its search monopoly, and where the European order could be cited as evidence in either direction. For now, Google has said only that it is reviewing the decision, a formulation that has preceded years of appeals in its previous European cases. The commission, for its part, has shown no appetite for compromise, having spent the better part of a decade building the legal machinery it deployed on Thursday.
For the AI companies that stand to benefit, the order is a door opening. ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest have built products that millions of people use, but they have struggled to reach users on phones where Google sets the defaults. If the order survives appeal, those companies get access to the distribution they have been missing. If it doesn’t, the status quo holds, and Google keeps the front door.
