Within days, the European Commission will decide how to implement one of the least-discussed provisions of the Digital Markets Act. Officially, it concerns Google's obligation to share anonymised search and click data with competing search engines. In reality, the decision will determine whether Europe can build an independent digital information infrastructure in the age of artificial intelligence.
Everyone knows George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet it may have been Aldous Huxley who, in the 1930s, described our digital age more clearly. In Brave New World, Huxley’s dystopia did not depend on coercion, surveillance or violence. It depended on something far more subtle: people voluntarily surrendering their freedom in exchange for convenience.
Nearly ninety years later, Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff showed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism how that fiction had become reality. Google, she argued, built a business model around the systematic capture of human behaviour. The goal was no longer merely to understand what people had done, but increasingly to predict what they would do next. Nobody forced us to participate. We consented, one search at a time.
That model now controls around 89 per cent of Europe's search market, according to StatCounter. In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia concluded in United States v. Google LLC that Google had unlawfully maintained a monopoly in general internet search. Yet the European Commission will now decide whether that monopoly can be challenged for the first time through a structural remedy rather than another financial penalty.
Google Search is now far more than a search engine. Through its ranking algorithms, the company determines which news sources Europeans find, which businesses customers discover and which political perspectives gain visibility. It has become arguably the largest information empire ever created.
Since 2017, the European Commission has imposed more than €8.2 billion in competition fines on Google and its parent company, Alphabet, for abuses ranging from favouring its own comparison-shopping service and tying Google Search and Chrome to Android to excluding competing advertising technologies.
Meanwhile, the economics of monopoly have continued to work in Google's favour. Europe's digital advertising market is worth approximately €120 billion each year. According to evidence examined during the Commission's competition investigations, Google captures around 35 per cent of the revenue generated across the digital advertising value chain. Alphabet’s global advertising revenue exceeded US$260 billion in 2024 alone.
Against figures of that scale, even record-breaking fines cease to be an effective deterrent. While legal proceedings continue for years, Google's data advantage, market power and revenues continue to grow. In other words, financial penalties may punish past misconduct, but they do not dismantle monopolies.
That is precisely why Article 6(11) matters.
Data, power and competition
The provision requires Google to share anonymised search and click data with competing European search engines, enabling them to compete on more equal terms. The objective is not to punish Google or favour individual competitors. It is to restore competition by reducing the historical data advantage that no rival could ever replicate on its own.
Google has opposed this obligation by invoking user privacy. Privacy is one of Europe's greatest achievements, and it deserves robust protection. But Article 6(11) does not require the sharing of personal search histories or identifiable user information. It concerns anonymised search queries, ranking signals and click patterns.
Yet during the European Commission's DMA compliance workshops in 2025, Google proposed anonymisation thresholds that, according to the participating European search engines, would render around 99 per cent of search queries unusable. A legal obligation that leaves only one per cent of the data usable is, in practice, no obligation at all.
Meanwhile, Google continues to use the same data internally across the Alphabet ecosystem – to improve Search, optimise its advertising business and train its AI models. If the Commission were to accept Google's interpretation, privacy would become an unintended shield for a monopoly rather than a safeguard for citizens.
The real threat to privacy is not the carefully designed remedy foreseen by the Digital Markets Act. It is the continued concentration of the search histories, click behaviour and information patterns of more than 450 million Europeans in the hands of a single American company.
Those same datasets now power far more than search. They have become one of the most valuable resources for artificial intelligence.
Every search query reveals what people genuinely want to know. Every click indicates which information they trust. Every ranking signal captures how knowledge is organised and evaluated. Together, these behavioural patterns form one of the richest training resources available for modern AI systems.
Europe is investing billions in AI, sovereign cloud infrastructure and data centres. Those investments are essential. But data centres answer only one question: where information is stored. They do not answer the more important question of who controls access to the data on which Europe’s future AI systems will be trained.
Giving European search engines access to these datasets is therefore not about lowering privacy standards. It is exactly the opposite. It is about giving Europe the opportunity to build an independent search and knowledge infrastructure that will eventually make dependence unnecessary.
