Sources: EU's antitrust regulators sent questionnaires to Google rivals last month, asking for details on Google's practices and impact on competing services
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
The questionnaires are the opening move in what the related coverage shows becoming a years-long escalation: Brussels gathering competitor testimony on Google before committing to a case. A year later that groundwork shows up as a preliminary investigation into Google's data collection practices, and by 2021 regulators were planning a formal probe into its digital advertising business.
What makes this 2018 filing round worth tracking is where the arc lands: by 2025 the Commission was preparing DMA charges over how Google displays rival results in search, and in 2026 Google was reportedly testing European search changes that surface competing vertical services alongside its own — the exact competitive-impact territory these rival questionnaires were probing.
First-order effects
- Google's competitors are now on record with regulators: each respondent must document how Google's practices affect its own services, handing the Commission a structured evidence base at no investigative cost.
- Google faces a widening evidentiary front — the questionnaires signal the Commission is building a file that can support either a new formal case or ammunition inside existing ones.
Second-order effects
- Rival services gain leverage from the process itself: their complaints, once filed into a live inquiry, become inputs to later charges like the DMA case over search-result display, shifting bargaining power toward complainants.
- The survey technique lowers the cost of opening follow-on fronts — the same questionnaire-to-investigation pipeline reappears around data collection and then advertising, so any Google practice with unhappy competitors becomes a candidate target.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, EU oversight of Google moves from episodic antitrust cases to standing structural rules: the endpoint visible in the coverage is enforcement under the DMA plus negotiated product changes, rather than one-off fines.
- For platform regulation generally, the sequence establishes rival testimony as the standard first step — competitors effectively co-author the regulatory agenda against dominant gatekeepers.
The trend: EU scrutiny of Google is escalating from evidence-gathering questionnaires through successive investigations toward durable structural enforcement under the DMA, with Google's search-display practices the recurring flashpoint.