EU Orders Google to Open Android AI Interfaces and Hand Search Data to Rivals

Brussels is shifting from the long, retroactive antitrust battles of the 2010s—think the EU’s 2004–2013 Microsoft Media Player case or the U.S. v. Microsoft tying suit of 1998—toward railroad-era style ex-ante utility regulation: set the tracks open before abuse can occur. By hard-coding interoperability and data portability into the DMA, Europe is treating search indexes and mobile operating systems like 19th-century telegraph rights-of-way or 20th-century phone networks—essential bottlenecks that must be shared to keep markets contestable. If the rules stick, they push Big Tech from proprietary moats to regulated infrastructure, a structural change that could echo for decades; if they fail, the episode will join a century-long pattern—Standard Oil 1911, AT&T 1982—where dominance is challenged but quickly re-concentrates through new technologies. Either way, this moment signals that digital gatekeepers are now being governed on the scale of utilities, not just punished after the fact, a precedent likely to frame platform economics for the next hundred years.