A few weeks ago, I traveled to Mountain View for my first ever in-person Google I/O experience. The presentations included live demonstrations and concrete examples illustrating how updates across a wide range of Google services will meaningfully benefit small businesses and consumers. The event was more than just glitz and glam, showcasing a lot of substance and garnering solid reviews from experts. But for tech policy nerds like me, it was hard not to wonder how the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and similar regulatory frameworks might frustrate consumer and developer access to these innovations.
Google Search Updates: Mini apps, generative UI, and agents. Google unveiled a series of features enhancing Search functionalities and options. One of the features, “generative user interface (UI),” allows users to create their own custom UI screens to explain complex data. For example, a user can create graphs and charts with sliding selectors, allowing them to interact with search results and produce accessible answers to difficult search questions. Similarly, the “mini apps” function will allow users to create custom dashboards for tasks and topics they search for multiple times, like searches associated with planning an event. Another feature will allow users to set up “information agents,” designed to surface timely updates to a user’s preferences—from dinner reservation availability to stock prices. Further upgrades will also make calls on a consumer’s behalf to check on reservation availability and perform other simple tasks.
For consumers, these updates mean Search is becoming more useful in a broader set of scenarios. For developers, they present more surface area to build on and more opportunities for consumers to find them.
The DMA Storm Gathers. Unfortunately, DMA’s provisions may prohibit or require dramatic changes to the Search updates. All of them are examples of Google providing a service on top of its existing platform, which the European Commission (the Commission) has designated a “core platform service” (CPS) under DMA. DMA’s Article 6(5) prohibits “self-preferencing,” where a CPS elevates its own offerings above those of a potential third party providing comparable services on the platform. Similar to how Costco highlights its own Kirkland brand t-shirts over Champion’s or a hypothetical third party’s, Google is rolling out its own generative UI feature, instead of a similar function made by any other company.
Crucially, DMA does not make exceptions for novel products or services for which the market has not yet fully developed. When Google rolled out its now-popular AI Overviews feature, experts saw Article 6(5) as a potential impediment. Google saw the same potential issue, delaying its rollout in Europe, and so apparently did the Commission, which was quick to launch a still-ongoing investigation into whether or not it complies. The fact that consumer generative AI services were hardly more than a year old and the contours of the market for them were as-yet undefined when AI Overviews rolled out has not saved it from close scrutiny. This is an oddity from a competition policy perspective because one of its globally accepted purposes is to seek outcomes like the offering of new products and the development of completely new markets for them. Likewise, generative UI’s novelty for non-developers and Search mini apps’ obvious benefits within the broader Search product both resemble the pro-consumer outcomes competition law seeks to produce—and yet may be irrelevant under a DMA analysis.
What it All Means. A look at these Search updates barely scratches the surface of what Google announced at I/O 2026. But they illustrate both how meaningfully beneficial these features will be for consumers and developers—and how they may eventually draw regulatory scrutiny as instances of ‘self-preferencing’ or for failing to fully subsidize third-party access. And while this scrutiny is almost a foregone conclusion for features building on Android and Search—already designated CPS—it remains to be seen whether the significant updates to Gemini will face similar hurdles. Ironically, Google’s Antigravity rollout represents a credible challenge to “agentic” coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor. Natural barriers to entry make it difficult to enter the market for agentic coding tools, and Google is uniquely positioned to challenge the current incumbents. If the Commission expands the scope of DMA to cover AI or cloud services, the same unfortunate regulatory quagmire awaits AI rollouts.
None of the developers I spoke with at I/O had any idea what DMA is. Unfortunately, this makes its threat to their access to Google products and services no less real. On the positive side, however, the United States has thus far declined to advance an American version of DMA—though we narrowly avoided such an outcome in 2022 in the form of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). Google I/O 2026 gave us a laundry list of innovations DMA and AICOA would likely complicate, undermine, or outright prohibit. For policymakers, the lesson is clear: if you want consumers and developers to benefit from innovations like generative UI and agentic coding, AICOA and DMA would defeat that purpose.