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Big Tech abuses: the rulings are in. What about your SMB?

Stories of Big Tech abuse, part 3: Apple, Meta and Google sanctioned, and what it changes here

In short: since April 2025, Big Tech abuses are no longer just alleged. They are ruled on. Apple, Meta and Google have been sanctioned in Europe for favouring their own services, preventing businesses from talking to their customers, or forcing consent to data collection. The 2018 Android fine became final in July 2026. In the United States, two monopolies were recognized in court without any breakup following. In Canada, the Competition Bureau is suing Google. For an SMB, the lesson is practical: courts take years to correct what a dominant supplier can change overnight. The best protection is still being able to leave. The post suggests a one-hour exercise to take stock of your dependencies and decide what to tackle first.


In this article

On July 2, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld a €4.125 billion fine against Google. It punished Android practices that the European Commission had sanctioned in July 2018. Eight years of proceedings, and Google has no appeal left.

In the first two parts of this series, the abuse stories of part 1 and those of part 2, we described behaviour that many people found exaggerated or anecdotal. This third instalment changes register. No more allegations or testimonials: this is about decisions handed down, amounts, articles of law and compliance deadlines.

This post goes over what has been ruled since 2025, explains the targeted practices in concrete terms for a business here, then looks at what these rulings do not change.


From anecdotes to rulings

For years, criticism of Big Tech rested on stories: a developer cut off overnight, a merchant pushed down the search results, a user tracked despite their settings. These stories were true, but they were easy to dismiss. A company could always say it was an isolated case.

Two things changed. First, in 2022 Europe adopted the Digital Markets Act, better known as the DMA. It designates "gatekeepers", meaning the platforms that have become unavoidable, and imposes specific obligations on them. Apple, Meta and Alphabet were designated in September 2023. The obligations became binding in March 2024. Second, the old competition cases opened in the 2010s reached the end of their appeals.

The result: in fifteen months, nearly nine billion euros in fines were imposed or upheld in Europe against three American companies. The table below sums them up.


What Europe has sanctioned since 2025

Date Company What it was found doing Amount Legal basis
April 23, 2025 Apple Preventing developers from telling customers about cheaper offers outside the App Store €500M DMA
April 23, 2025 Meta Forcing a choice between paying or accepting targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram €200M DMA
September 5, 2025 Google Favouring its own AdX ad exchange in the online advertising chain €2.95B Competition law
July 2, 2026 Google Android practices (2018 fine, upheld in final appeal) €4.125B Competition law
July 23, 2026 Google Favouring its own services in search, and restricting developers on Google Play €460M + €430M DMA

The April 2025 decisions were the very first taken under the DMA. Apple and Meta announced they would appeal. The July 2026 one was the first against Google under this regulation. Each time, the Commission ordered the infringement to end, with periodic penalties of up to 5% of average daily worldwide turnover for each day of delay.


Four practices that hit an SMB directly

These decisions can seem remote: billions, Brussels, lawyers. Yet each describes a mechanism that a small Quebec business also lives with, even though no court protects it here.

Putting yourself at the top of the list

In search, the Commission found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results. Its offerings are placed at the top of the page, with richer visuals and filters than competing services get.

For an inn, a retailer or an event organizer, this means their visibility depends first on what suits the platform. The search optimization work done on their own website can be pushed down by a box that Google reserves for its paying partners.

In practice: check your web analytics to see where your visits come from. If a single source brings you most of them, your traffic depends on one company. A mailing list, partners linking to your site and an up-to-date listing in your industry's directories reduce that risk.

Forbidding businesses to talk to their own customers

Apple, then Google, were sanctioned for the same family of practices: preventing a developer who distributes an app in their store from telling users that a cheaper offer exists elsewhere, or from closing the sale outside the store. In Google Play's case, the Commission found that the fees tied to this steering of customers were too high and charged for too long.

The principle goes beyond mobile apps. Whenever a platform sits between a business and its customers, it can decide what the business is allowed to tell them, and take its cut along the way.

In practice: if you sell through a platform (app store, marketplace, booking site), reread what its terms let you tell your customers and what it takes on each sale. From the first transaction, get a way to reach the customer directly, with their consent: the relationship then belongs to you rather than to the intermediary.

Pay up or hand over your data

Meta was sanctioned for its "pay or consent" model: between March and November 2024, a European user had to either pay a subscription or accept that their personal data would be used for targeted advertising. The DMA requires offering a version that uses less data, without paying.

Here, Law 25 governs consent, but it applies to businesses collecting information in Quebec, not to the internal rules of a foreign platform. An SMB advertising on Facebook or Instagram works inside an ecosystem whose model was found contrary to European law. We covered this in our post on telemetry and privacy.

In practice: take stock of the advertising pixels and trackers installed on your own website. They are what feed the platforms, and you are the one accountable for them: Law 25 requires that functions allowing a visitor to be identified, located or profiled be turned off by default. Your consent banner must therefore block them until the visitor has agreed.

Seller, buyer and auctioneer at once

The September 2025 fine concerns online advertising. Google runs the tool publishers use to sell their ad space, the tools advertisers use to buy it, and the exchange where both meet. The Commission concluded that Google had favoured its own AdX exchange since at least 2014, and indicated that only a separation of the businesses could resolve the conflict of interest.

An SMB buying online ads therefore pays in a market where the main intermediary plays both sides. So does a regional media outlet selling its ad space.

In practice: for each campaign, compare what you spend with what actually comes out of it: calls, quote requests, sales. Platform dashboards measure clicks and impressions, not your revenue. A campaign that is justified only by the platform's own numbers deserves to be questioned.


In the United States, found guilty but left whole

The American picture is more mixed. Courts recognized illegal monopolies, but each time they refused to break the companies up.

In September 2025, Judge Amit Mehta imposed his remedies on Google, already found to hold an illegal monopoly in search. He refused to force the sale of the Chrome browser. Instead, he banned exclusive contracts that impose Google Search, Chrome, Assistant or Gemini as defaults, and required Google to share certain search data with qualified competitors. The Department of Justice then appealed to get more.

In November 2025, Judge James Boasberg concluded that Meta did not hold a monopoly, dismissing the Federal Trade Commission's suit over the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. The FTC announced in January 2026 that it would appeal.

In September 2026, Judge Leonie Brinkema in turn refused to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange. Yet she had concluded in April 2025 that Google had illegally monopolized two advertising technology markets. She chose behavioural remedies over a separation.

Two monopolies recognized in court, three breakup requests rejected. The companies remain intact and keep setting the rules of their platforms, under supervision.


What about Canada?

In November 2024, the Competition Bureau brought Google before the Competition Tribunal for abuse of dominance in online advertising in Canada. It is asking that Google be forced to sell two tools: its publisher ad server (DoubleClick for Publishers) and its AdX exchange. According to the Bureau, more than 200 billion ad transactions on the Canadian web went through Google's tools in 2022.

The case is moving slowly. In March 2026, the Tribunal rejected Google's constitutional challenge to the monetary penalty being sought. In June 2026, it ordered Google to pay more than $358,000 in costs for that challenge. On the merits, no decision has been handed down yet.

Canada has no rule comparable to the DMA, which imposes obligations in advance on unavoidable platforms. Each abuse has to be proven, case by case, under the Competition Act. That is slower, and it leaves SMBs here without protection for years.


What the rulings do not fix

It would be tempting to conclude that the problem is solved and that regulators are doing the job. That would be a mistake, for four reasons.

Slowness. The Android case took eight years between the fine and the final decision. Meanwhile, the targeted practices produced their effects, and the market settled around them. An SMB waiting for a ruling before switching tools waits a long time.

The size of the fines. The DMA allows fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover, and 20% for repeat infringements. The fines imposed so far have stayed well below that ceiling. For companies this size, they look more like an operating cost than a threat.

Geography. The remedies required by the DMA target the European Union. Nothing obliges Apple, Meta or Google to offer the same terms in Canada. A Quebec business may well keep living with a practice already found illegal in Europe.

The power to change the rules. None of these rulings prevents a platform from changing its prices, terms or features tomorrow morning. We saw it with the Microsoft 365 price increase, flagged in our five-year comparison and in effect since July 1, 2026. A captive customer pays, whatever the courts say.


What an SMB can take from this

These decisions are very concretely useful for a small organization: they turn a hunch into an established fact. Depending on a dominant platform carries a risk that is documented, ruled on and quantified. It can therefore be handled like any other business risk, without activism.

A one-hour team exercise

Bring three people together: someone from management, the person who handles IT (even part-time) and the one who runs marketing or sales. Plan one hour and a shared spreadsheet. For each service the organization pays for or uses every day, fill in one row of the table below. The first two rows are examples.

Service What it is used for If the price doubles or the account closes Can you export, and in what format? Owner Plan B
Email and files (online office suite) The whole team's email, calendar and shared documents No email or shared files, the same day Yes, but mailbox by mailbox and folder by folder: one to two weeks of work IT IMAP mailboxes with an independent host, files in a cloud hosted in Canada
Social media advertising Campaigns that bring in quote requests Loss of an acquisition channel, with no loss of internal data Reports in CSV, but followers and audiences stay on the platform Marketing A mailing list of your own, search visibility for your own site

Add a column for the monthly cost if you want to put a figure on what is at stake: the last three months of invoices are enough.

Sorting: where to start

Once the table is filled in, give each row two scores from 1 to 3: how important the service is to keep the organization running, and how hard it is to leave. Multiply the two scores.

  • 6 or 9: critical and hard to leave. This service deserves a written plan B, even if it is never used.
  • 3 or 4: keep an eye on it. Check once a year that the export still works.
  • 1 or 2: nothing to do for now.

This week, then this quarter

This week, management books the hour and opens the spreadsheet. The IT person picks the two highest-scoring rows and runs a real export, then opens the file in another program to check that it is usable. Marketing notes the share of visits and sales that goes through a single platform.

This quarter, every row scoring 6 or 9 gets a half-page plan B: where we would go, how long it would take, who is in charge. The table gets updated once a year, or as soon as a supplier announces a price increase or a change in terms.

None of this means leaving the big platforms tomorrow. It is about knowing where you are stepping and keeping your options open. Our post on what is left standing in your SMB the day the American cloud closes suggests a realistic migration order, one layer at a time.


How we approach it at Blue Fox

By default, we deploy open source tools, hosted in Quebec, whose data belongs to the client and exports to open formats. That is the approach of Symbifox, our all-inclusive ERP: the price covers hosting and support, not the right to use the software. If a client decides to leave, their data leaves with them.

That does not mean everything has to come off the big platforms. Advertising, for example, still happens where the customers are. What matters is knowing what you rent, what you own, and what switching would cost.

Want to know where your dependencies are and which ones deserve a plan B? Let's explore it together.


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