Brussels Unbundles the Assistant: Google Must Hand Rivals the Wake Word, the Screen, and the Search Data

The decision that arrived early

On Thursday, July 16, the European Commission adopted two legally binding specification decisions against Alphabet under the Digital Markets Act. One tells Google how it must open Android to competing AI assistants. The other tells it how it must share search data with rival search engines. Together they amount to the most concrete answer any regulator has given to a question the industry has been circling for two years: what, precisely, does a phone owe an assistant that its manufacturer didn't build?

The timing is worth noting. The Commission opened both proceedings on January 27, 2026, each carrying a six-month statutory clock that ran to July 27. The decisions landed eleven days early. That is not how Brussels usually behaves in a fight with Google, and it suggests the Commission felt the record was complete enough that further process would only invite delay.

The mechanics are less dramatic than the headline. These are specification decisions, not infringement findings. Google was already bound by Articles 6(7) and 6(11) of the DMA; what it lacked — or claimed to lack — was a definition of compliance. Specification proceedings exist to supply that definition. Nobody has been fined, and the Commission has not declared Google in breach. But the decisions are binding, and separate DMA penalties remain available at up to 10% of global turnover. Brussels has stopped describing the destination and started drawing the map.

What Google actually has to open

The interoperability half, filed as case DMA.100220, rests on Article 6(7), which obliges gatekeepers to give third parties free and effective interoperability with hardware and software features their own services use. The Commission's proposed measures, published for consultation on April 27 and open for comment until May 13, organized the requirement into four layers.

The first is invocation — how an assistant gets summoned. Rival AI services must be able to register their own custom wake words, and to claim the entry points Google reserves for Gemini, including the long-press on the home button or navigation handle. In practice this is the "Hey Google" layer, and it is the one that matters most, because an assistant you must open an app to reach is not competing with an assistant that answers when you speak.

The second is context. Third-party assistants must get centralized access to on-device app data and the inputs needed to be useful — audio, screen content, and the processing resources to handle them. The third is action: assistants must be able to integrate with and autonomously control the user's apps, and to reach into system settings. The Commission's own illustrations are deliberately mundane — sending an email through your preferred mail app, ordering food, sharing a photo, booking a taxi. The fourth is resources: high-performance execution, access to Android's on-device system models for any third party, and the freedom to run proprietary models instead. Across all four, access must be free, available on all Android devices, equal among apps, and documented.

Read the list carefully and you notice it isn't really about assistants. It is a specification for agents — software that perceives your screen, holds your context, and acts on your behalf. Brussels has written the first binding legal definition anywhere of what an operating system must expose to an agent it doesn't own.

The data half

The second decision, under Article 6(11), covers search data. Google must give third-party search providers access to anonymized ranking, query, click, and view data on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. The Commission framed the goal as rebalancing the playing field so alternatives to Google Search can compete.

One thread here is unresolved in the reporting I can verify. When the proceedings opened, the Commission explicitly said it would examine whether AI chatbot providers qualify for search-data access alongside conventional search engines. Whether Thursday's decision settled that question in their favor, and on what terms, is not something I can confirm from the sources available today. It is the single most consequential detail in the package, because a frontier lab that could draw on Google's click-and-query stream would close a grounding gap that money alone hasn't closed. Anyone claiming to know the answer right now is reading further than the record supports.

Two and a half years, not two weeks

The dates are where hype meets reality. Google must begin sharing search data from January 2027. Android users see the interoperability changes from July 2027 — a full year from now, and three and a half years after the DMA's obligations first bound gatekeepers.

That runway is the story. Assistant defaults are sticky in the way search defaults were sticky, and the relevant question is what share of the habit is already set by mid-2027. Gemini will have spent that year as the assistant that answers when you talk to your phone. The Commission has ordered the door unlocked; it has not ordered anyone through it, and it cannot order users to care. The DMA's search-engine remedies offer a sobering precedent: choice screens changed defaults at the margin and left the market's shape intact.

There is also a build problem. Custom wake words and screen access are not features OpenAI or Anthropic can switch on the day the API documentation appears. Someone has to ship the Android integration, tune the latency, and win the trust needed for a user to grant an outside model continuous sight of their screen. Some of the firms best placed to exploit this decision are American, which is the irony Brussels keeps running into: rules written to open European markets often open them first for California.

Google's objection, and the part of it that lands

Kent Walker, Google's head of global affairs, said the measures introduce unprecedented risks to user privacy, device security, and national security, and warned that search-data sharing could expose Europeans' private searches to unfamiliar companies without adequate anonymization or consent. Alphabet's counsel has separately argued that forcing access to sensitive hardware and deep device permissions could undermine the protections European users rely on. Google's broader position has been that Android is open by design and that app store availability is access enough.

Most of this is what an incumbent says when told to share. The app-store argument is the weakest — being allowed to publish an app is not the same as being allowed to answer when someone says a wake word. But the security objection is not purely self-serving, and it deserves to be held apart from the rest. The Commission has just mandated that any qualifying third party can obtain screen contents, app context, and autonomous control of a user's applications. That is, functionally, the permission set of well-designed spyware. The DMA's answer is that access must be equal and documented; equal and documented is a competition standard, not a security one. Whether the decisions carry vetting proportionate to what they open is the thing to read the full text for — and the thing Brussels will be judged on if this goes wrong.

The takeaway

The Commission did something today that no other regulator has done: it defined, in binding terms, what an operating system owes an AI agent built by someone else. Four layers — invocation, context, action, resources — plus a search-data pipe due in January. Whether AI chatbot providers get that pipe on the same terms as search engines is the open question, and it is not yet answerable from the public record.

Don't expect the phone to change soon. The remedies land in 2027, into an assistant market whose defaults are being set right now, and the labs positioned to use them still have a year of engineering ahead. What changed on July 16 isn't the competitive landscape — it's that the specification exists, in writing, with penalties behind it. Every other jurisdiction weighing the same question now has a document to copy or argue with. That, more than anything Android users will notice next summer, is why this one matters.