The EU is protecting it's citizens. You don't have to spend very much time comparing the EU (and Europe in general) to the US to find differences in philosophy.

US has a very individual centric attitude where everyone is an temporarily inconvenienced millionare and Europe has a much more collective attitude. I will take the European attitude over the US one any day of the week (and I'm from neither, I'm Antipodean).

Every billionare is a policy failure.

But look at what "to compete" means in the European point of view, look at how they see the practices that you describe as "being competitive": nefarious, unethical practices to fuel growth for the hell of it. If they can't compete on some short-term, enshittification-causing metric, fine by me.

Aside from the fact that booking.com is a Dutch company (although Booking Holding is US, so who the hell knows any more as I have no idea how that all fits together...), no one is forcing anyone to do business in Europe. If you don't like the rules then don't play; that's fine, no hard feelings.

That's how it works everywhere, including in the US.

What you DON'T get to do is set the rules for OUR countries. Several of these companies have been under the misapprehension that's how things work, and they are being (slowly) cured of that delusion (far too late, but better late than never...)

You can phrase it in whatever way you prefer, but GP's point remains - a fine measured as a percentage of global revenue has been demonstrated to modify huge corporations' behavior.

FWIW, I think the EU's recent legal behavior is only about 1/3 foreign-company envy. There's a lot of misguided do-gooderism and a large dash of control-freakery, too, not to mention intelligence and LEO wishlists.

Aww, is that what you tell yourself?

The EU has actually enforce anti-monopolistic laws, even if it's quite slow. You should compare history of the food industry in Europe and in North America, I think this show well how much the US politicians changed over the last 50 years.