Brussels turns its competition law into AI industrial policy

Brussels just rewired Europe's AI supply chain without taxing a single euro. The European Commission's two specification decisions under the Digital Markets Act don't fine Google for its dominance; they force the company to ship rivals a real on-ramp into the Android AI stack and the search index that no commercial deal would have built. The EC frames these as competition enforcement under DMA Articles 6(7) and 6(11), but the practical effect of mandating interface access to Google's stack reads as industrial policy in practice.

The pattern is finally operational. When a single platform sits on top of a market for decades, the regulator's job shifts from policing abuse to mandating interfaces: specific access to specific features, with auditable obligations and a clock. Brussels is now publishing interface specifications the way telecom authorities once published roaming rules.

Who gains: European AI assistants and search challengers, including the chatbot builders the EC explicitly named, who can now build on top of Google's installed base instead of begging for SDK access. Who loses: the closed-garden economics that turned a default into a moat. What changes: other DMA gatekeepers are expected to have a template to model their own compliance, and every AI founder in Europe now has a door — at least in theory.