The European Commission (EC) on Friday hit Google with a €2.95 billion ($3.46 billion) antitrust fine for “abusive practices” in its adtech business. But observers said that IT leaders should look at the decision as a warning about a potential wave of global regulatory decisions on tech issues. 

For example, Friday also saw a major genAI player settling a case involving piracy of AI model training data. Anthropic on Friday told federal court officials that it had settled its genAI copyright lawsuit for $1.5 billion, a settlement possible because a federal judge last month dismissed other copyright claims. 

This is hardly Google’s first compliance challenge in Europe, or in other parts of the planet. And the EC statement described the Google fine as limited to one case against the company, keeping the door open to potential future actions. 

“The European Commission has fined Google €2.95 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in the advertising technology industry. It did so by favoring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers,” the EC statement said. “The Commission has ordered Google to bring these self-preferencing practices to an end and to implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain.”

Other Tech Issues To Come Into Play

Observers saw the enterprise IT impact as potentially substantial, given the large number of technology issues before regulators in Europe in addition to many other geographies. 

“This fine is bigger than Google and ads. It’s Europe signaling that technology monopolies, whether in ad-tech, AI, quantum, or open source, will face scrutiny,” said Stephen Klein, CEO of Curiouser.AI and a senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. “For enterprise IT leaders, that means regulation is now part of the roadmap. Just as we architect for security and scalability, we’ll need to architect for compliance and fairness.”

Klein added, however, that this fine is unlikely to change Google’s behavior.

“Google has no incentive to stop. For Google, EU fines are simply the cost of doing business. Since 2017, Brussels has fined the company over €11 billion [$12.9 billion], yet in that same period Google’s ad business has generated more than a trillion dollars in revenue,” Klein said. “The economics are obvious. The profits from bending the rules vastly outweigh the penalties. Until regulators restructure the business, this cycle of rule-breaking and fines will continue.”

Others echoed the sentiment that this fine won’t likely change Google’s behavior.

Brian Levine, a former federal prosecutor who today serves as the executive director of a directory of former government and military specialists called FormerGov, said this fine will likely be seen by Google as a rounding error. 

“[It] is an enormous fine to almost any company, except perhaps for the company at issue here,” Levine said, adding that the compliance push might cause consolidation, or at least cooperation/alliances, among the major technology vendors.

 Richard Bird, the chief security officer at Singulr AI, agreed that the fine is unlikely to materially impact Google. 

“Since Google was founded, they’ve had to pay nearly $20 billion in fines for lawsuits and regulatory actions globally. Either they have terrible lawyers or their old motto of ‘Do no evil’ was propaganda,” Bird said. “This isn’t remotely the only time they’ve been hammered for their unfair practices. But the numbers of dollars in fines compared to their last 20 years of revenue is laughable, and clearly not near enough to get them to fix or change their practices. Or get better lawyers.”

Industry Consolidation?

This kind of regulatory action may “make smaller vendors reach out to the larger ones, with a greater appetite for working together,” Levine said. 

“[It] might make the big [vendors] out there more open to partnerships, to sharing the wealth and to less tying,” he added, referring to the anti-trust legal concept in which a seller with substantial market share forces customers buying one product to also buy a different one of its products.

Erik Avakian, a technical counselor at Info-Tech Research Group and former state CISO for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, also anticipated substantial tech changes from the compliance push.

“Tech leaders, especially those in highly regulated industries like finance or healthcare, need to treat situations like this as a strategic risk,” Avakian said. “It’s an opportunity to push back against lock-in and demand more transparency around how analytics and cloud services are bundled. Better yet, look to decouple wherever possible.”

“[Enterprise IT executives] need to ask providers tougher questions. The fact that structural remedies are now on the table, and not just fines, means that the tools and platforms your organization relies on could change fast or be broken apart,” Avakian said. “If your entire digital or marketing stack is tightly integrated with one vendor’s ecosystem, then it’s time to reassess the risk.”