[1]: https://seznam.cz
The reason a lot of this antagonism exists is because the EU is not able to compete in a lot of these areas.
While there's a lot of good impetus is privacy legislation, there should be 10x more effort into gearing themselves to be more competitive.
Edit: Europe's inability to materially face this problem is by far the #1 issue. There definitely is an acceptance, on some level, behind closed doors certainly there is discussion and some action, but much more energy seems to be devoted to punishing foreign, successful companies.
It's a bad position to be in to try to legislate foreign behemoths than to have your own, and be worried about how foreign nations may be regulating your own behemoths.
Edit 2: I've made a similar comment a few times and it's guaranteed to be down-voted (again, that's fine, I don't mind it's not a personal issue I have no problem with votes) - but assuming that this is more than likely Europeans down-voting as a rough measure of disagreement, it's really quite a disturbing sentiment that at least popularly, there's difficulty in accepting the obvious lack of competitiveness in these areas. This is why I say it's the #1 challenge - until there is acceptance, there will no progress.
"The EU" entirely depended on Google not doing that. And by that I mean the bureaucracy and other apparatjik - not the people.
Had Google literally banned Europe the backlash would be large, large, large against 'the EU' from people who live there and were trying to live and do their day to day online activities.
Yeah, it'd be Evil, but sometimes companies should really swing back at heavy handed regulations.
Also if there were GOOD European alternatives to those google service people would use them, but there simply aren’t. Low salaries and terrible regulations are to blame.
Honestly, what, beyond the account infrastructure, is integrated in googles consumer products?
There are no good European alternatives due to a conflation of these issues, not just because of regulations, that's such a naive (or willingly ignorant) take on a complex issue.
How would European tech companies start and compete against FAANG right now? Given that the EU market is quite fragmented between demographics and language? How can an European tech company avoid being acqui-hired or acqui-killed by one of the current massive tech giants?
If you don't develop your arguments of what kind of regulation holds EU tech companies back and posit that against the issues I mentioned then I can't really trust you understand the problem and differences between markets that give benefits to the US economy, as it always had, it's a massive and more homogeneous economy than the EU.
Let's compare US vs China tech as that seems more of an appropriate comparison from the baseline.
Low salaries, yes, but that's a failure of leadership, but also a systematic problem of companies inability to make tons of money.
It's a long laundry list and it can't be boiled down just to a few things, they are so intertwined it's hard to separate the issues.
I think the EU would have loved that. There are perfectly viable alternatives to pretty much everything that Google offers, some of which created in Europe. They just never gain any traction because it's convenient to just use Google for everything.
I still use Gmail and Google Calendar at the moment, but that's primarily out of inertia. The biggest thing I'd miss would probably be search, but even for that there are reasonable alternatives.