Dirk Auer on the EU’s Google Search and Android Mandates
Dirk Auer, director of competition policy at ICLE, is quoted in this NewsFire article on the European Commission’s new requirements for Google search and Android. Dirk warned that forcing Google to share search data and provide rival AI assistants with deeper system access could reduce consumer choice while creating privacy and search risks. Read the full paper here.
In a reaction to Brussels Signal, Dirk Auer , director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, noted that the likely result is fewer AI assistants for Europeans, not more.
“There’s a difference between ensuring users can choose a different default assistant and forcing Google to hand every rival the deep system access it built for itself. Apple faced the same demand and decided to keep Siri AI off EU iPhones entirely. Google’s rational response will likely be to delay or degrade Gemini in Europe.”
Auer said that the Commission has the market backwards, noting that “Google is the challenger in the AI assistant market. ChatGPT holds roughly 70 per cent of EU chatbot usage, and Anthropic has risen faster than anyone over the past year. The decision strips a secondary player of its main differentiator, namely ecosystem integration, and tilts the field toward firms that never needed one.”
He also warned against uncontrolled agentic access, calling it “dangerous”.
“Assistants that read screens, simulate taps, and transact inside a user’s apps open the door to surveillance, credential theft, and unauthorised purchases. That risk is inherent to the capability and cannot be papered over by ordering Google to bolt on safety backstops.”
He said the Commission was applying only half of the Digital Markets Act. While the legislation expressly allows companies to take proportionate measures to protect security, Brussels was insisting Google first demonstrate “objective and verifiable evidence” of harm before doing so, he said.
“This will create tangible harms for Europeans. Europe has already seen Gemini’s AI Overviews, Meta’s Threads, and now Siri AI delayed or withheld over DMA obligations — a pattern of defensive levelling-down that leaves European users with less capable products than everyone else.”