Google Sues to Keep Its Search Data and Android Locked Down — and OpenAI Is at the Center of the Fight

The Court of Justice complex in Luxembourg, home to the EU's General Court, where Google filed two legal challenges against DMA orders on Sept. 28. Photo: Cédric Puisney / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Google has gone to court to stop Europe from prying open the two most valuable assets it owns: its search data and its Android operating system. On Monday, the company filed two separate legal challenges at the EU's General Court in Luxembourg — Europe's second-highest court — against antitrust orders that would force it to share private search queries with rival search engines and hand AI competitors the same deep system access its own Gemini enjoys on Android.

The filing escalates a confrontation between Google and Brussels over how far the European Union's Digital Markets Act, the bloc's flagship law for reining in Big Tech, is allowed to reach. And it lands with unmistakable timing: the orders in question only start biting next year, Google's biggest AI rival stands to gain the most from them, and Washington is already treating EU tech enforcement as a trade war issue.

Google frames the fight as a defense of its users. Brussels frames it as the world's richest search company manufacturing a privacy scare to protect a monopoly. This one is headed for years of litigation — and the outcome will shape the phone in your pocket and the AI race on both sides of the Atlantic.

Two challenges, one argument

The two cases were filed Monday, September 28, Reuters reported, citing the company's announcement. They target two binding orders the European Commission adopted in July under the Digital Markets Act.

The first order requires Google to give search-engine rivals access to its search data — the queries, rankings, clicks, and views that make Google Search what it is — and to help artificial intelligence developers use services available to its Gemini AI model. The second order requires Google to open Android to rival AI assistants, giving them the same system-level hooks Gemini uses: voice activation, contextual access to what is on screen, the ability to act across apps, and access to hardware and software resources that are currently reserved for Google's own services.

Google is not arguing the technical fine print. It is arguing that the whole enterprise is unsafe. "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," said Oliver Bethell, Google's senior director of competition, in a statement.

The company added that Android is already open and interoperable, and that the EU's decision would force it to hand over private search data to other firms without adequate anonymization, user knowledge, or consent, according to AFP's reporting of the company's position.

What the EU actually ordered Google to do

To understand what Google is fighting, you have to go back to July 16. That is when the Commission adopted two legally binding "specification decisions" — the DMA's mechanism for spelling out, feature by feature, exactly what a designated gatekeeper must do to comply. The proceedings had been open since January 27, and the move followed roughly two years of regulatory dialogue that, according to the Commission, produced no workable voluntary remedy.

The search-data measure is the more consequential of the two for Google's core business. Under it, Google must begin supplying anonymized Google Search data — queries, ranking, clicks, and views — to eligible third-party search engines and AI chatbots that offer search functionality, starting in January 2027. The arrangement runs on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, with pricing rules, security checks, and anonymization requirements baked in. Google is also permitted to vet recipients to make sure they do not pose cybersecurity or data-protection risks. AI chatbots with search functions — including OpenAI's ChatGPT — are explicitly named among the intended beneficiaries.

The Android measure covers 11 features that rival AI assistants currently cannot fully use. Subject to user consent, a competing assistant would be able to offer voice activation, live translation, speech-to-text, app actions, and proactive suggestions — summoning a third-party assistant by voice the way users now say "Hey Google," then letting it draft an email, place an order, or pull a flight number out of an inbox during a call. Roughly 60 percent of mobile users in Europe are on Android devices, the Commission has noted. The main requirements are expected to land in Android 18 from July 2027.

Both decisions are legally binding but pointedly do not determine whether Google has breached the DMA — and they impose no fine by themselves. The hammer behind them is the DMA's penalty structure: non-compliance can draw fines of up to 10 percent of a company's global annual revenue, rising to 20 percent for repeat offenses, plus periodic penalty payments.

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company argues the EU's orders would force it to hand over private search queries and weaken Android's security. Photo: Asoundd / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The privacy fight: Google's case vs. Brussels' rebuttal

Strip away the legalese and this is a collision between two principles that rarely sit comfortably together: competition and privacy. Both sides claim to be defending the same user. They just define the threat differently.

Google's case is visceral. "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 argument is that search queries are not ordinary business data; they are a diary of human anxiety, and forcing Google to pipe them to competitors — including the AI companies building chatbots on top of that data — cannot be undone once the data is out. On Android, the company says, opening system-level access to third-party assistants pokes holes in the platform's security architecture.

The Commission's answer, in essence: we thought of that. The executive arm of the EU has said both measures contain robust safeguards protecting the privacy of users, device integrity, and security. The search-data framework establishes a multi-layered anonymization process meant to keep individual users unidentifiable, lets Google raise serious cybersecurity and data-protection concerns about recipients, and sets transparent procedures for who gets access and at what price. The Android measures, the Commission says, open functions only to competitors meeting prescribed security and privacy standards, and always subject to the user's own consent.

There is a deeper disagreement hiding inside the procedural one. Brussels spent roughly two years trying to get Google to volunteer a data-sharing arrangement and concluded the company's own proposals were too narrow to be useful — stripping out so much of the data that no competitor could actually use it, and excluding AI chatbots entirely. From the Commission's perspective, the binding orders are what happened after the soft approach failed. From Google's, the Commission is now demanding access to data that cannot be anonymized to the company's satisfaction, whatever the rulebook says.

The plot twist: DuckDuckGo backs the regulators

The sharpest quote of the week did not come from Google or Brussels. It came from DuckDuckGo.

The US-based privacy company — known for running a search engine that does not track users' search history or personal data — backed the EU watchdog outright. "The anonymization framework is robust and no amount of manufactured doubt changes that. The only thing an appeal buys Google is time," a DuckDuckGo spokesperson said, as reported by Reuters.

That is a striking lineup. A privacy-first company that has spent its entire existence warning users about Google's data collection is telling the public that Google's privacy argument against the orders is, in its word, manufactured. DuckDuckGo is also precisely the kind of smaller rival the search-data order is designed to help — an independent search engine that has long argued it cannot compete with Google partly because it cannot match the query data that two decades of dominance have bought Google.

Read the quote as a strategy assessment rather than just a jab. General Court challenges routinely take a couple of years to resolve, and DuckDuckGo is betting that delay is the actual product Google is buying: every month of litigation is a month Google keeps the data, keeps the Android advantage, and keeps rivals at arm's length. Whether that reading is fair or self-serving — DuckDuckGo benefits directly from the orders it is defending — it captures the dynamic Brussels fears most: that the legal process itself becomes the remedy's undoing.

Why this matters in America: OpenAI, Android users, and Trump

Europe is the venue, but the stakes run straight through the United States.

Start with OpenAI. Reuters named the company as the kind of AI rival the orders are meant to help, and Commission reporting has identified OpenAI's ChatGPT as an intended recipient of the shared search data. Think about what that means: Google, the company whose search index is arguably the most valuable proprietary dataset in technology, would be required to supply anonymized query, ranking, click, and view data to the company racing it hardest in AI search. For American AI startups watching from the sidelines, the precedent matters as much as the data — Brussels is establishing that a dominant search engine's query corpus is, at least in part, a shared resource.

For American consumers, the effects are indirect but real. Android is not a European operating system; it is a global one, and engineering changes forced into Android 18 for the EU do not stay neatly inside European borders. If rival assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity can suddenly hook into voice activation, cross-app actions, and contextual data on hundreds of millions of EU devices, the pressure to offer the same everywhere — and the technical groundwork to do it — follows quickly.

And then there is the president. The Trump administration has made EU enforcement against American tech giants a trade issue, not just a regulatory one. In July, after the Commission hit Google with a €890 million DMA fine — €460 million for tilting search results toward its own shopping, travel, and other verticals, and €430 million for Play Store restrictions — Trump took to Truth Social to declare that the EU would pay "a very big price" for what he called an "illegal and highly discriminatory practice," warning that Washington would launch a Section 301 trade investigation and that a "substantial" tariff could follow. He folded in earlier fines against Apple, Meta, and Amazon for good measure. As of this writing, the White House has not publicly weighed in on Monday's court filings — but the administration's position on Brussels-versus-Silicon-Valley is not ambiguous, and Google knows it.

What happens next

The calendar is now the most important character in this story. The search-data sharing is supposed to start in January 2027 — barely three months away. The Android interoperability changes follow from July 2027. Google's challenges ask the General Court to annul the orders, but the cases will take far longer to resolve than the deadlines allow, which is exactly why the interim period matters: what Google must actually build, and when, while the litigation runs.

Google has spent the better part of a decade litigating EU antitrust decisions, and it has occasionally won — the courts have not always agreed with Brussels. The Commission, for its part, designed these specification decisions to be technically precise and heavily safeguarded, precisely to survive the judicial scrutiny it knew was coming.

For OpenAI and the rest of the AI field, the message is to keep building toward a world where the data arrives in January — while knowing that the company holding the data is now fighting in court to make sure it never does.

Sources: Reuters; AFP; Digital Watch Observatory; TokenPost; 2eu.brussels; Business Standard/Bloomberg.