The EU Didn’t Break Up Google. It Made Google a God.

You woke up this morning, unlocked your Android phone, and Google did everything. It told you the weather. It routed you past traffic. It answered a question you were too embarrassed to ask another human. It was seamless. It was beautiful. And the European Union just ordered that beauty to be dismantled.

Here’s the thing nobody is telling you: this isn’t a breakup. It’s a coronation.

The EU’s latest mandate — forcing Google to open Android and Search to rivals under the Digital Markets Act — reads like a victory for competition. Regulators are pounding their chests. Rival app stores and search engines are popping champagne. Commentators are writing think pieces about how the tech giant is finally being humbled.

They’re all missing the point.

When you force a monopolist to share its pipes, you don’t destroy the monopolist — you turn it into a utility. And utilities don’t compete. They tax.

Think about it. What happens when the EU says Google must let competitors plug into its infrastructure? Every rival — every scrappy search engine, every alternative app store, every would-be Android challenger — now has to route through Google’s systems. They depend on Google’s APIs. They rely on Google’s data pipelines. They sit on top of Google’s rails.

Google doesn’t lose power. It becomes the landlord.

You’ve probably noticed this pattern before. The EU tried to break Microsoft’s browser dominance by forcing a ballot screen. Internet Explorer still died — but not because of regulation. It died because a better product (Chrome, made by Google) killed it. The EU’s antitrust case against Microsoft was a victory lap for the next monopolist.

Now we’re doing it again. The EU is mandating interoperability, and Google is already positioning itself as the neutral infrastructure layer that everyone must use. It’s complying with every rule, checking every box, and quietly becoming the regulated utility of the entire mobile internet.

Regulation doesn’t dismantle power. It licenses it. The moment government tells you that everyone must access your infrastructure, your infrastructure becomes mandatory — and so do you.

Let’s talk about what this means for you, the person holding the phone.

That seamless Google experience you love? The one where Search knows where you are, Android knows what apps you use, and everything just works? That’s going to fragment. You’ll be asked which search engine you want. Which app store. Which assistant. Your phone will become a series of choices you never wanted to make.

And here’s the dark punchline: most of those choices will still route back to Google.

The rival search engine that the EU empowered? It still needs Google’s ad network to make money. The alternative app store? It still runs on Android, which Google controls. The competitor’s assistant? It still pulls data through Google’s APIs.

Google becomes both the competitor and the arena. It’s like forcing a casino to let rival poker tables in — but the casino still owns the building, the chips, and the security cameras.

The EU didn’t break Google’s walled garden. It just made the garden bigger, hung a sign that says ‘Open to All,’ and handed Google the key to the only gate.

There’s a real argument that this is dangerous. Not because Google is evil — that’s a lazy take. But because we’re creating a world where one company becomes the regulated backbone of European digital life. When every competitor must plug into Google to exist, Google doesn’t just dominate the market. It IS the market.

The EU wanted competition. It’s building a monopoly with better paperwork.

And you — the user — get the worst of both worlds. You lose the seamless experience that made Google worth using in the first place, and you gain nothing in return except a phone that asks you annoying setup questions. Your data still flows through Google’s pipes. Your searches still touch Google’s infrastructure. The only difference is that now, so does everyone else’s.

You can mandate openness. You can’t mandate independence. And a world where every competitor depends on Google is not a world where Google has less power — it’s a world where Google has more.

The EU should have asked itself one question before writing this mandate: if every road leads to Rome, does it matter how many different cars you put on the road?

Google isn’t being broken up. It’s being anointed. And we’re all going to pay the toll.