Europe pries open Android for rival AI

The European Commission has handed Google two sets of binding specification measures under the Digital Markets Act, adopted July 16 and enforceable immediately. The first says rival AI assistants must get the same system-level Android integration Google reserves for Gemini. The second says Google must begin sharing anonymized search data with competing search engines by January 2027, through a multi-layered anonymization method built alongside privacy regulators to stay inside the DMA/GDPR line. John Gruber, flagging it on Daring Fireball, called the scope “breathtaking.”

He’s right that it’s sweeping, and reasonable people will argue about whether a regulator should be this deep in a platform’s plumbing. But the underlying idea is one we’re sympathetic to: interoperability is what keeps a platform from becoming a private toll road. When one company gets to decide which assistant can reach the system layer, the device stops fully belonging to the person holding it.

We build on the assumption that the machine is the owner’s, not the vendor’s — that a good platform is one you can bring your own tools to. Watching a government try to legislate that back into existence is a strange, instructive thing. The cleaner path is to design for it from the start.