This is such a great outcome for Google, they could not have gotten such a good outcome if they had bribed the legislators directly. They've essentially enshrined the infrastructure Google has already as a legal requirement for the bare minimum threshold to host a web site now. Google can sit back and stop worrying about there ever being competition from Europe now.
US tech giants haven't worried about competition coming from Europe for awhile now. They worry about competition coming from either within the country or China.
The two biggest problems US tech giants have, are fines-as-taxation from the EU and France increasingly pushing for the idea of a restricted competition zone for the EU (a poor attempt at how China incubated its own tech giants by walling everything off). Germany is dramatically more globalist economically (an export giant), so most of the EU's regressive insular ideas will come from France in their style of protectionism.
A distant third problem are US regulators, which are slowly moving forward with targeting the tech giants (which now has both sides of the political machine looking at them, for different reasons). The giants no doubt feel like they can massage that situation better, as it's their home turf. They're invasive aliens as far as the EU is concerned.
They'll just block payments to those sites. You know, from the advertisers - the actual customers of the platform. No one cares what people use for free. This is about money.
It's funny how many laws meant to punish the mega-corps, as they get designed with mega-corps entirely in mind, end up hurting small/medium businesses (and future mega-crops) and further solidifying the mega-corps position in the market.
I don't think it's surprising the global economy is littered with long-standing monopoly with little competition. It's not merely economies of scale, vertical integration, and other benefits of size, but because the business environment perpetually gets harder and harder for entrepreneurs to operate in.
The growth in the size of modern state-capitalist nation-states naturally coincides with the growth in monopolistic mega corporations - at the expense of things that have made capitalism so powerful and effective (competition checking abuse of customers, rapid innovation, etc).
Accidental regulatory capture seems to be more common than nefarious intentional corruption when it comes to policy reinforcing monopolies. History is littered with examples of well-intentioned policies backfiring.
The rat pelt bounty in French Vietnam led to rat breeding. The US luxury tax led to the wealthy saving more money and mass layoffs in the luxury industry. Bank regulations in the wake of the financial crisis gave big banks a competitive advantage over small banks.
These aren't apples to apples examples, but they show how regulatory action often has unintended consequences due to the complexity of the real world.
+1, they already comply, but if I were to launch something with UGC, I should probably host it in Afghanistan and back it by a company registered on the Moon.
> Google can sit back and stop worrying
Name one company from EU who have a slight potential to be a minor threat for (YouTube / Search)
Does it matter if that company is from EU? Even a new engine centralized in the US won't be able to operate in the EU without substantial cost. That's a pretty big market/data source to miss out on.
I've seen the debate and some politician said that big platforms should be stopped. Which is why I thought that why not work on creating an environment that supports competition rise from the EU? But yeah, it shouldn't matter where new players come from, however I think a Chinese startup will laugh at GDPR and upload filters.
This is ends up being effectively a tariff, though - if fewer advertising platforms can take European customers, then that allows those platforms to raise their prices for those customers, essentially meaning that European businesses end up paying more for advertising than their competitors from elsewhere.
