Android runs on billions of phones around the world, and it does so at no licensing cost to the manufacturers that build them. It is one of the clearest cases of American engineering reaching nearly every corner of the globe, a free and open platform that gave consumers cheaper devices and gave developers a market to build on. On July 2, Europe’s highest court decided that success carries a price tag of €4.1 billion.
The Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the penalty over the way Google distributes Android, closing an eight-year appeal. The ruling also confirms something NetChoice has warned about for years. Europe has built a major revenue stream out of penalizing American technology companies for winning.
The DMA Turned a Long Habit Into Law
The Android case began in 2018, well before the Digital Markets Act took effect. It belongs to the same story. Over fifteen years, Brussels has treated the largest American tech firms as a revenue source, collecting close to €11 billion from Google alone across its shopping, search, advertising, and Android cases. The DMA took that habit and wrote it into permanent law.
The law’s own architect was candid about the target. Andreas Schwab, the European Parliament’s lead negotiator on the DMA, said the rules should focus on the top five companies rather than sweep in any European firm just to appease Washington. Those five are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. Every one of them is American. Every DMA non-compliance investigation opened to date has targeted an American company.
American Companies Pay While European Rivals Are Spared
The pattern is easy to read in the numbers. In 2025 alone, the EU fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million under the DMA, then hit Google with a €2.95 billion antitrust penalty over its ad-tech business. Compliance costs for the five targeted firms may exceed $1 billion a year. The DMA’s revenue and user thresholds were drawn high enough to capture American firms and leave European competitors comfortably below the line.
When Brussels forces our companies to divert money from building new products into paying fines and rewriting their services for European regulators, it shields the local firms that could not win that competition on their own. That is the point of the exercise. The DMA props up preferred rivals at the expense of the consumer.
This Is a Trade Barrier, and It Belongs at the Trade Table
Whatever Brussels calls it, the DMA functions as a trade barrier. It raises the cost of doing business for American companies and hands their proprietary data and technology to competitors, all while generating revenue for a government that has struggled to grow tech champions of its own. American officials have named the problem plainly, describing the DMA as extraterritorial regulation used to extort American firms and calling it a tax on American companies.
The larger danger is imitation. The EU has handed other governments a blueprint, and countries watching Brussels collect billions will draw the obvious lesson. Fining American innovation is a reliable way to raise money and prop up domestic industry. Left unanswered, this ruling tells every capital that is weighing an EU-style regime that the strategy works.
That is why NetChoice has urged the administration to make reform of the DMA and Digital Services Act a condition of any trade agreement with the EU. A deal that leaves these regulations untouched gives Brussels permission to keep drawing cash from American firms while enjoying full access to the American market.
The administration can protect American innovation by refusing to sign any trade deal that leaves the EU free to tax our success, and by making clear to every government watching that targeting American companies will carry a cost of its own.