Google Labeled U.K. Tech Gatekeeper Under New Competition Law — Update

By Edith Hancock

The U.K.'s competition enforcer labeled Alphabet's Google as a company it needs to keep a close eye on due to its ubiquitous search engine and lucrative search-advertising business.

It is the first time the Competition and Markets Authority has completed a probe into whether to class a tech giant as a company with so-called strategic market status under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act. The legislation aims to curb Big Tech's market dominance, and benefit businesses that rely on their search engines and app stores to make money.

Under the act, companies like Google will have to follow a bespoke set of rules that apply to their popular platforms. The CMA started investigating Google under its new rulebook in January. The regulator can fine companies up to 10% of their annual worldwide turnover for flouting the legislation.

The CMA said Friday that Google has substantial and entrenched market power in general search and search advertising. Google's Gemini artificial-intelligence chat assistant won't be under the scope of the ruling, but Google's other AI-based search features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode will be, it said.

"By promoting competition in digital markets like search and search advertising, we can unlock opportunities for businesses big and small to support innovation and growth, driving investment across the U.K. economy," Will Hayter, the CMA's executive director for digital markets, said. Hayter added that 90% of online searches in the U.K. are carried out on Google's search engine.

The regulator is also working on a set of interventions for Google's platform and expects to begin consulting on those rules later this year. That could include obliging Google to show users choice screens so they are able to easily select a competing search engine as their default on devices, and ensuring publishers have more transparency, attribution and choice over how their content collected by Google is used in AI-generated responses.

"Many of the ideas for interventions that have been raised in this process would inhibit U.K. innovation and growth, potentially slowing product launches at a time of profound AI-based innovation," Google's senior director for competition Oliver Bethell said.

Global competition regulators have long struggled to rein in the world's largest technology companies under existing antitrust rules, partly due to how rapidly digital products and markets evolve. The U.K.'s DMCC act is one of a handful of new pieces of legislation aimed at redressing that balance. The European Union's Digital Markets Act also classes a small group of companies, like Google and Apple, as gatekeepers. This is due to what the bloc sees as the companies' control over key routes to market in the digital economy, such as search engines and smartphone-operating systems. Japan enacted a law last year that specifically targets smartphone software, while parallel rulebooks are also being developed in South Korea and Brazil.

Write to Edith Hancock at edith.hancock@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 10, 2025 06:40 ET (10:40 GMT)