I cannot think of a legitimate basis to discriminate by country.
A startup is free to release globally, because nobody will care if they spit out something false, there's no money to extract for penalties and fines.
If Google's Bard says one thing wrong in the wrong country, it has the potential to cost the company hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
In places like the EU, governments see Google as a giant piggybank of funding. They know Google will not pull out of any region as large as the EU, so they will use any excuse to introduce fines and penalties. They also know Google can, and will pay. Hence they've hit Google with nearly €10B in fines over the last few years.
Microsoft could completely kill Bing in the EU with very little effect to their bottom line.
But you do bring up a good point. Why be so conservative if Bard isn't even tied in with Google search?
My only guess is Google turning into a global whipping boy for fines has made them trigger shy.
Those fines were clearly not high enough.
Is that how you call trying to protect consumers over there? Really, there are genuinely good reasons for those "stances".
Any connection you draw between native language and region is tenuous at best.
Similarly, it is increasingly common to get two Spanish tracks… one for “Latin American” Spanish (which is what you almost certainly learned if you took Spanish in school) and European (aka Iberian or Castilian) Spanish.
One of the most obvious is that ce/ci, and some z’s are pronounced “th” and not “s”. So a Spaniard would say “cinco” as something like “thinko”.
This why it’s “wor-es” (Juarez) Mexico, but “her-eth” (Jerez) Spain.
Is that hyperbole? Because that would be very sad if true, culturally speaking. There are 5 different official languages in my country (Spain) and there are several laws to prevent them from becoming extinct for this very reason.
I guess I should say I'm counting adults. Everyone who went through mandatory schooling was taught English. Everyone who didn't (immigrated) is more likely to know English than Swedish.
So the only people who know Swedish but not English would be those who flunked out half way through mandatory schooling, or immigrants who knew neither English nor Swedish, and only learned Swedish.
Swedish is not disappearing (c.f. your example in Spain), but basically everyone speaking Swedish is (at least) bilingual.