Google has asked the EU’s General Court to suspend rules requiring it to provide qualifying competitors with access to search data, taking one of the Digital Markets Act’s most technically sensitive competition remedies into court before the sharing regime is fully implemented.

Google is challenging binding measures adopted by the European Commission in July under Article 6(11) of the DMA. The provision requires designated search gatekeepers to make ranking, query, click, and view data available to rival search engines on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.

Reuters reported on 30 September that Google had also sought an interim suspension from the Luxembourg court while the wider challenge is heard. The company argues that the order creates a risk of serious harm to the privacy of European users, while the Commission says its measures contain protections for personal data, integrity, and security.

The rules reach beyond conventional search engines because the Commission has designed the regime to cover qualifying AI services with online search functionality. Generative AI has blurred the boundary between conversational assistants and search products, giving access to large scale search behaviour new importance as companies build systems that retrieve live information from the web.

Search behaviour becomes a competition input

Google’s long standing scale gives it access to volumes of search activity that smaller rivals cannot reproduce independently. Queries, clicks, views, and ranking behaviour can improve relevance systems and help a search service understand which results users consider useful, creating a feedback loop between market share and product quality.

The DMA attempts to weaken that advantage without requiring Google to provide its algorithms or underlying search technology. Eligible competitors instead gain access to an anonymised subset of the behavioural information generated by Google Search, subject to technical, security, and commercial conditions.

AI services complicate the implementation because live web retrieval has become part of products that were not originally designed as search engines. A chatbot can answer a user directly while searching several sources in the background, making search data potentially useful to companies competing with Google in both conventional retrieval and AI assisted information services.

Access will not be automatic. Applicants must operate a genuine online search service, demonstrate that they can handle sensitive information, and comply with rules surrounding international transfers of personal data. The Commission’s framework also allows Google to assess applicants for serious cybersecurity and data protection risks.

Useful data is also sensitive data

The dispute turns partly on whether anonymisation can preserve commercial usefulness without exposing individuals. Search histories can reveal health concerns, financial problems, political interests, locations, relationships, and other private information, while combinations of apparently anonymous signals may still create identification risks.

The Commission says its July measures use several layers of anonymisation and permit exclusions for organisations that present serious security risks, including certain sanctioned bodies or entities controlled from jurisdictions associated with structural cybersecurity or data protection concerns.

Google says those safeguards do not go far enough. Its request for interim relief asks the court to stop implementation before the underlying challenge is decided, arguing that disclosure could create harm that cannot easily be reversed once data has been transferred to competitors.

The commercial terms will also determine how much the remedy changes competition. The DMA requires access on fair terms rather than requiring Google to provide the dataset without charge, so pricing must be low enough for qualifying competitors to use the service while recognising the cost of preparing, securing, and operating it.

Implementation was already moving through staged deadlines before the court application. The Commission required Google to publish information for prospective beneficiaries and prepare an application process, with further work on licence terms, test samples, the anonymised dataset, and pricing following into early 2027.

The legal challenge does not resolve whether rival search services will ultimately receive the data, and the General Court has not yet ruled on Google’s request for an interim measure. The Commission has said it will defend the order, while Google is separately challenging another DMA decision concerning interoperability between Android and competing AI services.

Europe is therefore testing the DMA on an unusually difficult resource. Search data acquires competitive value from its scale and detail, but those same characteristics make it sensitive. The court dispute will determine whether the Commission’s attempt to open that resource can proceed while the underlying privacy challenge is still unresolved.