When does a “directions” button become a competition-law violation? When it points to Google Maps, according to the European Commission. A law meant to police search rankings is becoming a license to police the whole page.
On July 23, the Commission fined Alphabet €460 million for favoring nine of its own services on Google’s search results page: comparison shopping, flights, trains, hotels, local places, Google Maps, a translation box, sports scores, and even the games that appear when you search for “solitaire.”
The Commission’s cease-and-desist order requires Google to stop “displaying interactive pointers to its own distinct or additional services on the [Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP)], such as in tabs or in links to these services when a user clicks on a reservations, directions or any other button” (paragraph 712(c)).
That raises a basic question about the reach of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Article 6(5) prohibits designated “gatekeepers”—large platforms subject to the law—from giving their own services preferential treatment in “ranking or related indexing and crawling.” These processes determine the order of search results and collect and organize the information behind them.
But the Commission’s order also restricts where Google places links and buttons for its own services on the page—even when those features don’t appear to rank search results.
Does “ranking” now cover anything that appears on the screen? If so, gatekeepers could be barred from featuring any of their own products or services in drop-down menus on their own websites. We argue that this stretches the DMA’s definitions of “ranking” and “search results” too far, with no clear limiting principle.
Sharing a Screen Isn’t Enough
Article 6(5) forbids a gatekeeper to “treat more favourably, in ranking and related indexing and crawling,” its own services and products than similar offerings from third parties. Articles 2(22) and 2(23) of the DMA define “ranking” and “search results,” respectively. Read together with the law’s designation provisions, they establish three limits.
First, the obligation applies within the designated “core platform service”—the specific service covered by the gatekeeper’s designation (Article 3(10)). Recital 51, an explanatory passage in the DMA, describes the problem as favoring the gatekeeper’s offering over third-party offerings “also operating on that core platform service.”
Here, the designated service is Google Search, which lets users “input queries in order to perform searches,” as the Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation puts it. The designation covers that search service, not google.com as a whole or the entire Google ecosystem.
Second, for search engines, ranking means “the relevance given to search results,” and search results are information “returned in response to, and related to, a search query.” The definition casts a wide net: It covers any format and anything “offered in connection with the organic results”—the unpaid search listings. But a query must still generate the item. Something that isn’t returned in response to a query can’t be a search result and therefore can’t be ranked.
Third, for marketplaces, ranking concerns goods and services “offered through” the platform. This part of the definition doesn’t require a query, but it still has a boundary: It covers goods and services offered for consumers to buy through the marketplace, including the platform’s own competing offerings. Recital 46 describes this “dual role”: The platform both runs the marketplace and competes with sellers on it.
A link on the marketplace page to a separate service doesn’t, by itself, make that service an offering sold through the marketplace or subject to its ranking rules.
There’s a principle that connects these limits: “Ranking” concerns the output of the core platform service’s defining function. For a search engine, that output is search results. Google’s shopping, hotel, and flight boxes would therefore fall within Article 6(5) under its Google Search designation: They appear in response to a query, relate to it, and appear above rival links. (We happen to think a per se rule—a categorical ban—against favoring one’s own offerings is bad policy, but that’s a different story.)
But the provision doesn’t extend to everything that happens to share the screen with those results.
No Button Left Behind
Rather than start with the DMA’s definitions, the Commission relies on its 2023 designation decision, which Alphabet did not appeal. That decision declared that “all results or outputs” Google Search displays on its results page “constitute search results” (paragraph 27).
The Commission uses that premise to expand Article 6(5)’s scope in three moves.
The Commission starts with tabs. A hotel query produces a “Lodging” tab that opens a full page of Google’s own hotel-search feature. The Commission treats this as self-preferencing—favoring its own service—because “no third-party CSS gets such a tab exclusively for its own inventory” (paragraph 253). CSS stands for “comparison shopping service,” which lets users compare sellers’ offerings. The Commission’s logic suggests that Google must give rival comparison shopping services, such as Idealo and Kelkoo, their own tabs—or remove the tab for its own service.
It then extends that reasoning to buttons. Clicking a hotel opens a preview with a “directions” button linking to Google Maps. The Commission reasons that anything “offered in connection with the organic results” counts as a search result, so the button “ranks” Google Maps (paragraphs 496–497). It ranks Maps more favorably, the Commission says, because “no similar services can be reached after clicking the directions button” (paragraph 514).
But that establishes only that the button leads to Google’s service. It says nothing about how Google ranks services by relevance. If the button’s mere existence amounts to self-preferencing, Google must either sever the connection between its hotel-search feature and Google Maps or link every hotel aggregator—a service that collects hotel listings—to every mapping service through a series of dedicated buttons arranged at random.
The order itself takes the final step. Paragraph 712(c) covers tabs, links, and “any other button,” without tying them to a query or referring to the statutory definitions. Read literally, the order also covers Google’s app menu and permanent links to its other services—even when they appear regardless of what the user searches for.
The Commission hasn’t declared Google’s logo a form of ranking, but its order offers no clear reason to exclude it. By that logic, Google should presumably display competitors’ logos alongside its own on the Google.com homepage. At that point, users might need help figuring out whose search engine they’re using.
Compliance by Subtraction
Why does this matter? To start, because the Commission’s approach requires no showing of harm (paragraphs 86–87), gives no weight to user expectations (paragraph 64), and rejects consumer benefits or quality tradeoffs as a defense (paragraphs 189, 255, 512, 515). That leaves the law’s defined scope as the only check on overreach. If the DMA mistakenly bans practices that help competition and consumers, strict limits on where it applies are the only safeguard against wider market harm.
Europeans can now see what that harm looks like. On Sept. 8, Google rolled out a redesigned results page for EU users. The updated hotel and flight search results no longer show current prices or descriptive labels, and users can no longer filter those results by travel dates. A senior Google executive called the overhaul the largest reduction in search quality in the company’s history.
Google has an obvious incentive to portray the changes as harmful, but that doesn’t mean its criticism is wrong. If the Commission can restrict anything on the page without considering whether users lose useful features—and the DMA’s review process cannot recognize those losses as a failure—what stops enforcement from making search steadily worse?
If regulators can’t weigh a practice’s benefits before banning it, the law must narrowly define what they can ban to avoid sweeping useful features into the prohibition. The DMA’s architects recognized as much. They justified omitting an “efficiency defense”—a chance to show that a practice’s benefits outweigh its harms—by promising clearly defined, tightly limited obligations (recital 65).
The DMA itself recognizes that gatekeepers need incentives to keep improving their services. It says diminished “contestability”—the ability of rivals to challenge an incumbent—“reduces the incentives to innovate and improve products and services for the gatekeeper” (recital 32). When the law is ambiguous, its interpretation should therefore preserve the gatekeeper’s incentive to improve its core platform service. Otherwise, enforcement risks producing the very stagnation the DMA aims to prevent.
Two features of the Commission’s approach suggest that what ultimately matters here is whether Google owns the service—not whether it treats competing services equally.
The Commission acknowledges that Article 6(5) doesn’t require equal treatment across the board. It targets favoritism toward Google’s services, “and not favouring of any group of business users of the OSE over another”—OSE being shorthand for “online search engine” (paragraph 89). If Google can give Booking.com a prominent paid placement but can’t include a directions button linking to Google Maps, the distinction turns on who owns the service receiving that prominence.
The Commission also offers Google two ways to comply: Give every “similar” rival equal prominence, or “remove all prominence” from its own services (paragraph 713). For a directions button, the first option is hardly workable without wrecking the connections among Google’s services. Imagine opening a hotel listing and finding dozens of “directions” buttons—one for each competing mapping service. In practice, Google instead has an incentive to comply by removing useful features, such as the directions button, rather than crowding the page with buttons for every rival.
A Prime Example of Overreach
The consequences may not stop at Google’s search page. Amazon offers a useful test of how far the Commission’s interpretation could reach—and where the DMA’s limits should hold.
The Commission announced investigatory steps into Amazon’s treatment of its own products in March 2024. That November, Reuters reported that a formal investigation was likely, although no formal proceedings appear to have followed. If they do, Amazon’s natural defense will be that many features the Commission might challenge—such as promotional boxes and menu links for Prime Video, Amazon Music, and Alexa—are matters of website design, not ranking.
Under the framework outlined above, Amazon would be half right. Its own retail offerings and private-label goods compete with third-party sellers for the same customers in the same marketplace. That’s the “dual role” described in recital 46. Wherever Amazon promotes those goods within Amazon Store, it offers them “through” the platform. They are the output of the marketplace’s defining function, so Article 6(5) applies.
Links to Prime Video and Alexa, however, would be different. Those services aren’t marketplace offerings, and a Prime Video link takes users outside the designated core platform service.
In addition, Article 6(5) requires a similar third-party service “also operating on that core platform service.” Netflix isn’t a seller on Amazon Store, so a Prime Video link doesn’t favor Amazon’s service over a competing offering within the marketplace.
Yet paragraph 712(c) of the Google decision, coupled with the Commission’s demand for equal prominence for each similar rival, draws no such distinction. It identifies the following as preferential treatment:
Displaying interactive pointers to its own distinct or additional services on the Google SERP, such as in tabs or in links to these services when a user clicks on a reservations, directions or any other button on the Google SERP with more prominence than similar services offered by third parties, as set out in recitals (490) – (517) of this Decision.
Apply that logic to Amazon, and it would have to add Netflix and similar rivals to its menu—or remove its own streaming-service link.
‘Any Other Button’ Meets Its Judge
Google faced a Sept. 21 compliance deadline and an early October deadline to challenge the decision before the General Court, the EU court that reviews Commission decisions. The DMA’s obligations apply regardless of their effects (recital 11). And the Google Shopping ruling that self-preferencing is not abusive as a general rule came two years after the DMA had already made it per se unlawful for gatekeepers.
The legal fight will therefore turn on what Article 6(5) actually covers: the ranking of search results or every link and button on the page. Courts are well equipped to interpret defined terms; they don’t need a theory of market power to decide what counts as a search result.
In June, the General Court annulled Meta’s Marketplace designation because the Commission hadn’t explained its reasoning well enough for the court to review it. Three paragraphs of analysis supporting an order that reaches “any other button” invite similar scrutiny. So does a fine justified by the provision’s supposedly “clear language,” when the DMA itself anticipates that its requirements will need further specification (paragraph 648).
The Commission Needs a Stop Button
For all the DMA’s flaws, its drafters set boundaries: Search ranking concerns results returned in response to user queries, and marketplace ranking concerns products and services offered through the platform. Those limits tie the law to specific activities within designated services.
By stretching those definitions to cover directions buttons, static tabs, and potentially “any other button,” the Commission erases those boundaries. A regulation meant to help rivals compete risks discouraging improvements, stripping out useful features, and leaving consumers worse off.
The DMA promises more competition. It shouldn’t deliver less search.
