Note the difference between "flow" and "revenue". Two completely different things. The reason why most of google's money flow goes through EU is various tax break arrangements. As a result, if it were to get kicked out, not only would it lose the market, it would lose lucrative tax deals.

FTY: google didn't "go offshore" in China. It left China entirely. It's blocked in China now.

Suggesting that EU is "losing" here sounds a lot like "oh EU is losing to microsoft, what can it do?" back in the days of browser monopoly fight. Until EU decided to actually take action and suddenly "oh EU is losing" whine changed to "oh evil EU is oppressing this nice US company" tune here on slashdot. And that wasn't even "gloves off" kind of action - they didn't actually plan to break up microsoft. And vendor lock in was far stronger in that case, as there are no real alternatives to much of microsoft software right now.

Learn from the history.

It's the exact opposite. Sexual organs enable exchange of extremely high amounts of information. Single cell organisms are exceedingly simple in comparison, and as a result the method you talk about works well for them.

Attempting the same with more complex organisms would result in overwhelming amount of failures due to permutations being lethal or disabling in nature far more often than not.

They as in the other interested parties. Issue is far more complex than you present, with far more stake holders. And yes, I do in fact mean stake holders rather than share holders because there are a lot more of people invested in the issue than just shareholders. You have everyone from security apparatus that made deals with google to various companies that really like google's ad network and value it brings. All of these have vested interest in google staying in Europe.

Europe itself would not need to replace google at all. You seem to forget that much of google's development and multiple server centres, as well as overwhelming majority of google's money flow is in Europe. Even if google could shake off the former, latter is its main artery it needs for basic survival. That is why I consistently point out that you don't go into a direct conflict with large sovereign states as a corporation - that is not a fight you stand to win. Instead you subvert the government by buying influence through various channels available to you. In this case, google's problem is that there's a lot of other stake holders that while interested in google remaining in Europe aren't interested in it maintaining its current monopolist position.

You last point appears to be about you simply not wanting to look at the reality - that internet hasn't brought on a "global culture", if anything it did the exact opposite. It brought together the small fringe outlier groups together and created huge echo chambers where pundits peddle their opinions to their own circle which is mostly insulated from outside influence. And mind you, google is guilty of causing this more so than other companies because of the way its search personalization works. A good example of global warming issue - if you read a lot of articles and do searches on denialist side, google search will serve you mostly material it thinks you're interested in, that is denialist material in searches for facts. At the same time if you're on the other end of the spectrum, google search will produce facts that support your view on the very same searches that resulted in denialist material for the other person.

I don't think you quite understand how the whole "sovereign government vs corporation" thing works when sovereign government is not one of a shitty banana republic.

You don't pick fights with governments as a corporation. That is like a little girl walking into a cage with a big gorilla and starting to poke it with a fork. You will have your neck broken.

Instead you infiltrate and subvert that government. Problem being that other corporations get to do the same thing, so you have to fight them for subversion.

Considering the mood about Google across the EU, ultimatums against a major EU member may be viewed as ultimatum against EU. At which point it will be more of a Tyrannosaurus Rex against the said little girl with the fork.

Overall, Microsoft must be looking at the situation and just waiting for Google to fuck up so they can grab the single biggest and most profitable search market in the world. I can already see the arguments before the Commission: "yes, we can fill the void left by Google on much friendlier terms if you choose to legally eject them from the continent for abusing monopolistic rights".
And while many posters on slashdot are actually stupid enough to get that kind of an outcome, I don't doubt for a second that Google's exec team is not.

This is the standard Anglo approach to the problem. Present a false black and white argument instead of the actual argument, and then present an ultimatum.

Most European cultures including Spain do not have such a culture. Instead, they would likely prefer to negotiate with google on the issue. Google instead chooses to openly extort the country by offering them only two choices which you suggest.

I suspect they get to pull this once, maybe twice, after which EU will offer them a choice. Work with EU regulators and withing EU law or leave world's single biggest market.

At which point any google exec that would push for leaving will have an unfortunate fatal car accident arranged by major stake holders and Google will negotiate.

Google can't do this because it would get absolutely murdered by anti-monopoly regulators for even trying. Abuse of monopolistic power would be extremely obvious in scenario you describe.

Publishers do not have legislative powers. Democratically elected leaders do.

Democracy means (at least in theory) that demos, the people get to decide what is best for their country. And right now, a lot of people across Europe are not fond of Google's obvious disregard of them as unimportant enough to not even be negotiated with.

In general, most European nations have a tradition that these things are negotiated on. US/UK tradition is in direct conflict with this, and is more of posturing and ultimatums.

It's called "abuse of monopoly position". When you're a monopolist, you lose a lot of basic rights that most companies have. Regulation to prevent this exists on our experience with Trusts of early 19th century and what happened to progress then they gained over their respective fields.

Google, being in a monopolist position may not be in a position where it can extort entire countries by just walking away (which it is doing in Spain). With current mood being like this across the EU, it just may trigger a pan-EU response.

Do you even understand that you're talking about building mobile networks, while the story talks about patent fight over mobile phones?

These are two separate businesses with their own mostly separate patent pools, R&D and production units and so on. All the relevant old time giants - Nokia, Eriksson, Motorola etc all had separate units for networks and phones because of this.

You seem to keep confusing the two because they are both about "mobile". In reality, two businesses have about as much commonality as supercomputers and embedded systems do. Almost none. Even their common factor, usage of airwaves produces two completely different problems. Base station needs to be able to hear very faint signal coming from mobile phone far away and can push a lot of power to transmitter to send and has extremely complex antennas doing the beam forming to ensure best coverage, while mobile phone needs to minimize energy on both sending and receiving data as well as be good at receiving signal with small omnidirectional antenna in any position.

Source: anyone who actually follows the industry. Eriksson has been one of the leaders of mobile networking gear since the times of NMT. It has also been the leading phone manufacturer back in the days of NMT and GSM.

It hasn't been a major phone manufacturer since early 2000s however, when its mobile phone unit got crushed by Nokia. That's why they had to do the join venture with Sony.

When that mostly fell through, they sold the unit to Sony, while getting to keep most of the patents and licensing them to the Sony's mobile phone division. This is EXACTLY what happened to Nokia and Microsoft - Nokia kept most of the patents and licensed them to Microsoft.

The reason why this deal is so good is because buying company saves a lot of money on not purchasing the patents but getting to use them. Meanwhile selling company gets to go very aggressive on mobile phone patent violation claims because it no longer has a phone production unit that needs to be shielded from counter suits.

That is why when Nokia-Microsoft deal started to be made, a lot of regulators sought assurances that Nokia wouldn't go full patent troll with its mobile phone related patents after it has no phone manufacturing business of its own to risk.

Which is irrelevant to the topic at hand, as a lot of patent trolls spend a large amount of money either researching or buying necessary patents.

And as noted, Eriksson that spent "billions on R&D" and Eriksson that you have today are two different companies that merely share the same name. Eriksson that actually did the development is known today as "Sony". Just like the unit that developed Nokia phones is now known as "Microsoft".

No, concerns Nokia. Not sure about the source you used that would claim otherwise, as it was very widely known and posted even here on slashdot that MS didn't actually get the patents with purchase, but license to use patents. Most of relevant patents stayed with Nokia.

And yes, they did depend on Chinese. You cannot buy a unit with significant presence in China without getting acceptance from pro-competition parts of bureaucracy. Same goes for other large countries. The deals made are usually agreements with said agencies that enable company to conduct business that would otherwise cause rejection of deals.

Nokia was even more of that. In spite of it, Nokia and Microsoft had to make significant promises to Chinese, Indian and Korean authorities at least (and likely EU and US authorities as well) that Nokia would not patent troll other companies after sale of mobile phones division to Microsoft.

Patent trolling refers to non-producing entity going after producing entities, shielded by the fact that they have no manufacturing so no danger of counter-suit.

That's not how large aquisitions work.

Eriksson, like most early mobile companies had two major arms - networks and mobile phones. This is because early development work was mostly in developing both network and phone side elements.

It's mobile phone arm was a massive loss leader, largely crushed by Nokia Mobile Phones unit in early 2000s. They first fused it with Sony's tiny one, forming a co-owned Sony-Eriksson unit. Then in 2012 Sony bought Eriksson out of the business, at which point Eriksson focused on mobile networks. This left Eriksson with a healthy stack of patents out of the deal, which it uses here to troll other mobile phone manufacturers.

This is the same risk that competition watchdogs in various countries feared to come from Nokia after MS purchased its mobile phones division as well, which is why that deal included some heavy clauses on Nokia not patent trolling. Apparently no such clause or insufficient clauses were included for Sony-Eriksson buyout deal.