It probably wouldn't happen over night, there would be some time to get data out of google. Taking into account that gmail is still accessible by IMAP I guess there would be a plenty of other providers who would offer transfer of your emails from Google to a new email account.

Let me ask you: If Google closed everyone's Gmail accounts overnight to make a political statement, even if the EU relented, how many customers would stay with Google after that? There are limits to how much Google can punish users for their countries' legal decisions without risking losing those users forever.

Not many, but if they see not being broken up as fundamental to their business model working (I don't know if they do, but I could imagine Gmail not making much money on its own might pose problems), it might not make that much of a difference for them.

I am actually pretty sure that Google will not exit business in Europe. And even if it does happen, I am sure that not all of Google will vanish from Europe overnight and people will be able to download all their data.

Google offers Takeout today which lets you download your data.

Good luck finding somewhere else you can reimport that and continue working. It might as well be an encrypted blob.

I think it would be more like Google couldn't sell advertising to European companies, nor provide other paid services like licensing and the sort.

That's one part of the negotiation puzzle. EU would want it's citizens to retain access to their google-hosted emails.

Legally speaking, I'm sure there's plenty of ways the EU can force Google to do things it currently does not want to do.

I'd say the EU has lots of negotional angles currently to win things from Google. That is kind of what you get when you have more or less universal legislation power over 40% or so of the world's purchasing power (please correct me, I just bullshitted that guess). And that, alas, was also a large part of why the EU was born. So now we'll will reap the benefits.

If I could say anything to our EU negotiators in this case, it would be: stay brave.

> That is kind of what you get when you have more or less universal legislation power over 40% or so of the world's purchasing power (please correct me, I just bullshitted that guess).

Europe GDP is 20.9 Trillion USD. The world GDP is 107 Trillion USD. So Europe is only 20% of the world GDP.

But one can make the argument that EU citizens are better connected and spend more on digital goods. Though I'd be surprised if it drives more than 30% of Google revenue.

Alphabet Inc. break their revenue down into:

EMEA, APAC, Other Americas, US

Out of this, in 2017, EMEA was 32.5% of total revenue, based on numbers from page 33 of https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20171231_alphabet_10K.pdf.

My bullshit-guess is that out of those 32.5 percent units, EU/EES was responsible for about 31 units or so, and the rest 1.5 was from the middle east and africa. (Reasoning: the ME certainly has money, but no population to speak of. Africa has lots of people but besides relatively tiny South Africa very little revenue for Google.)

So yeah, the EU has a pretty powerful hammer.