Your entire argument is based on a false assumption. It's like saying that there's no barrier to entry in the space mining business other than excellence in technology.

"Excellence in search" is not very easy, and given the Internets size requires a massive infrastructure by itself. In addition, you can have the best search engine in the world, as long as nobody knows about it, it's worthless. And since a large percentage of Internet users are only dimly aware that they're using a search engine when they type some words into the address bar, it's not as easy as you assume it to be.

You missed the main part, I figure. Nobody is trying to break up the search market. Anti-trust is all about preventing a dominant player in one market from leveraging its dominance to become a dominant player in other markets where it would not prevail on merits alone.

The search market, for all this regulation, would be unchanged.

Great idea!

Oh, wait...

That's exactly what they're thinking about.

Tell me, do you really believe it is the anti-trust department that decides upon sanctions? If not, why bring up this strawman when my argument was that this department, at least is working nicely? I didn't say other parts of the EU do.
 

Because Drupal has security flaws, too.

Not everyone wants to write their own CMS and deal with the security issues. Wordpress probably is the absolutely worst choice, though.

The problem is that the US can ignore the law when it wants to. Although we're not seeing the average US citizen whisked off to gitmo, the general lack of respect for rights means that you cannot count on yours being protected.

Nonsense. One of the ways that corporations are different from real people is that you can split them into parts without killing them.

So we'd have AdSearchGoogle, headed by Larry Page, and ServiceGoogle, headed by Sergey Brin. AdSearchGoogle would be prohibited for 5 years to favor search results pointing to ServiceGoogle, and that's it.

Googles business is advertisement. Their services are excuses for showing you advertisement. In this business, these two things are pretty much the same thing.

You need to go back to reading comprehension 101. The part that's nationalistic about the GP post is USA nationalism, not european.

Which, as a per capita value is again dependent on the population number for total value, and the population of the EU is 60% larger.

Strangely, they seem to think otherwise, because they're going to great efforts to do business in Europe.

China is much less connected to the world and especially the language barrier is massive. There's more to language than making a translation. Why do you think Facebook has almost no traction in Russia? It's not that they couldn't find someone who writes kyrillic.

Like it or not, idiots or not, they do have such business, simply because your poor little "american company" is no such thing. It's an international corporation that was once founded in america, but now does business all over the world, including within the EU and actually quite a lot of it.

If you think the barrier to entry in the search market is low, you should have a talk with Yahoo or MS, both of which have spent a billion or three on what you call "almost nothing". Either they're all idiots, or you're missing something.

But actually a good thing. Of course you'll deny that if you drank too much of the neo-conservative cool-aid, but to any thinking person it's quite clear that the total dominance of a few global superplayers is not beneficial to the market or the people.

I'll be frank, I despise my government here in Germany and if they all vanished tomorrow and were replaced by monkeys giving random orders, we'd probably be better off. But in a few things, they somehow manage to do the right thing, despite their total lack of competence.

Nah; it was Venus.

They do. The anti-trust part of the EU is actually one of the few that's working pretty good. And before the usual stupid comments come running: They go against EU companies as much as against USA companies.

Probably not. Consider the thoroughly-documented example of the evolutionary process at work in the modern world. This doesn't affect the belief systems of the religious folks, who still insist that evolution is bogus, and has nothing to do with our modern world. One of the major cases is with the over-use of antibiotics, especially in agriculture. This is forcing the evolution of resistance in most of our disease organisms, destroying the value of many of our medicines. The evidence of all this has no effect at all on the religious believers. They also put pressure on the school systems (especially here in the US) to eliminate evolution from the textbooks, so the people responsible for this evolutionary pressure (mostly in agriculture, but also in medicine) don't understand the issues, and continue to make frivolous or incorrect use of the antibiotics.

Historians have documented many such cases in which our ancestors had knowledge that their actions were leading to disasters, but they continued anyway. These are typically cases where short-term actions were profitable to the people doing them, but bad for society in the long run. History says that we humans don't respond logically to such situations. We continue to act for short-term profit, and ignore the long-term results. Our "leaders" also tend to take actions that encourage this, by hiding the information or denying the validity of knowledge that can't be hidden.

There's no reason to expect that we can organize on a global scale to fix such problems. Our political systems tend to be controlled by the wealthier people, who are the ones ultimately profiting from the short-term results of the problems. About all we can do is prepare for the predictable long-term results, when possible.

This stupid nonsense is posted every time the EU acts in relation to american companies.

It's among the worst nationalistic hogwash misconceptions ever, easily on par with North Korea rambling about its moon base.

The EU is bigger than the USA in almost every metric, especially on the important ones: Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).

Any big american company deciding to withdraw from Europe would have its board of directors kicked out faster than they can sign the paperwork to make it happen, or watch its stock crash & burn, because they've just not only moved out of its biggest market, they've also given a free playing ground for a global competitor to emerge unchallenged.