> They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.
You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.
Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of that market.
I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture, history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into the EU.
I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition.