EU can just fine Google and use that money as a foundation to build competitors.

Need not to be more complicated than that. It is not like Google is the same darling it once was at home either. The public now has an appetite to go after US big techs not vice versa.

And Google won't have a valid defense against it, unless the US government comes to play

making a search engine is not that hard or expensive, getting users to switch to it after decades of relying on and trusting google is

I would actually argue that making a good search engine with quality and responsiveness worldwide rivaling Google web search turns out to be an architecturally hard problem.

A basic web crawler is not. A semantic web crawler and associated search engine capable of mapping real human input to useful information and dealing with the heterogeneous structure of data on the web, with low millisecond latency?

Bing has been working on that problem for years now, how come they haven't caught up more with Google?

It's a much more well understood problem now than it was when google was founded and the tools and platforms available to assist are light-years beyond what was available then. Many failed search startups have shown again and again that marginally better results are not the deciding factor in using a search engine, it's what's the installed default and how trusted the brand is.

I agree. Bing seems to have mostly solved the crawling problem by now, but not the query relevancy problem.

But then again, there are also a lot of other problems Microsoft haven't been able to solve...

Making a search engine was not hard 20 years ago. But now the internet is filled with so much more crap that it actually is.

That's not really a comparison that makes sense. Mexico has very little leverage on the US. EU has loads of leverage on Google.

We shall see. It has thus far been in Google's best financial interests to make nice in the European markets because of the size of the user base that they would leave on the table if they responded to EU pressure by shutting down services.

I'm unsure if that continues to be true if the EU siphons money off of them to build a direct competitor.

The EU represents close to 50% of potential/projected revenue to Google in the next 10 years, is my guess. That's what I meant when I wrote "loads of leverage".

It's not that simple. In a scenario where google was shut out of the EU you'd have a lot of pissed off citizens, and google knows this.

I don't think it's in the basic values of the European Union to suddenly block Google. We're talking increasing taxation, over a 5-20 year period, that kind of thing. We're not North Korea or the PRC.

Or in some other other gradual way. Anyway: it's not a binary over-night thing based on a whim of some dictator.

Either way, I fully trust the competency of the people running these things; they have proven themselves in the past. I'm writing that as a Swedish citizen who is a little bit skeptic about whole the EU thing. This part though - I trust these EU bureaucrats. My impression is that there's a team of very sharp people working on this.