Don't pretend to speak for "EU citizens". What have we got to do with Brussels and Microsoft stealing money from Google? Google is not a utility, it is a product company and you are free to use other companies products

> you are free to use other companies products

It doesn't work like that. Because of their market dominance, there really are no alternatives. This is a combination of companies simply giving up on competing with Google, but also in terms of SEO, Google is the only one that matters for publishers and advertisers drive profits towards Google as well. Mobile? They now own it.

And btw, if you'll mention DuckDuckGo or Bing, the there's a high probability you're not living in the EU, since those are really, really bad at local or non-English searches.

> It doesn't work like that.

Then don't use any. You are not entitled to it, nobody has any obligation to have a service that does what you want.

Well, if it's my backyard you're talking about, a company doing business in it might as well obey the house rules.

Google isn't entitled to doing business in the EU either. If they do, then they need to follow the law.

By the same logic Google could also abandon the EU market. But they most probably will not. So Google should stick with what they get.

Pure pragmatism.

EU citizens vote in their national elections. EC members are nominated by national governments. If your government appointed someone that you feel doesn't represent your interests and you feel strongly about it, you should vote for someone else in the next election. This is exactly how representative democracy should work.

Yet polls across the world have shown this logic to be very flawed. The citizens often disagree with the actions of their representatives. That's a flaw of representative democracy itself.

Point is, representative democracy doesn't mean the action of the representative is the one the population agrees with.

>you are free to use other companies products

I don't have the freedom to use another search engine with the scale and access to user data that Google has because the barriers to entry in this market are staggeringly high.

Staggeringly high barrier to entry == utility

>stealing money

Google has the freedom to not pay the fine and shut down operations in the EU.

>>Damn, I hate this trend of making you comments appear more controversial.

I take it as a way of saying "this will probably be a controversial opinion here, but..." which is totally fine.

It's a good way to preemptively color the reader's perception of your comment. Makes you seem more reasonable and knowledgeable when you seemingly recognize the controversial nature of what you're saying, even if it isn't actually that controversial at all. It's a commonly-seen tactic on reddit.

Which this place is becoming. Where should I migrate to?