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So, iiuc your argument, they're too big to punish by lawful process in democratic countries. Then I argue they should be split up, which is another popular argument.

Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?

That said, the current slap-on-the-wrist model clearly isn't working either

> it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages

This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)

The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.

it feels like there's some lack of equivalence that makes this analogy invalid.

Unless junkies have started a new service to help me find the nearest hospital that I'm not familiar with. Otherwise, spontaneously blocking Google could cause material harm to people reliant upon it. You'd be surprised how many users are so net-ignorant that they wouldn't even know how to get to Bing if their default page stopped resolving.

If the junkies are providing a service, then they are Google in this analogy. Taking away drugs from junkies does cause material harm, but perhaps long-term good.

Certainly I acknowledge that Google provides useful and maybe even essential services to people. But just because we want those services doesn't mean we necessarily need to allow Google to continue providing them. A parallel in the drug world might be shady pharmacists who get people hooked on painkillers. Yes, maybe it's good to have Vicodin, but that doesn't mean we need to let this particular person control it. Similarly it might be good to have maps, but that doesn't mean it's good to have some megacorp controlling them --- even less so if they try to use that as leverage to prevent regulation of other harmful aspects of their business.

"Material harm now for maybe long-term good later" has been the goal of many a soul-saver throughout history... And they tend to go down in history as the problem, not the solution.

Regarding loci of control: I've been using mapping tools built on OpenStreetMap as of late, and they're good, but they're no replacement for Google Maps. Things Google makes simple like "restaurants near me" are just fall-flat-on-your-face bad in most of the OSM clients I've seen. So I'm loathe to declare we need to kill the working thing when the alternative is worse. My preferred approach to ending a Google map monopoly would be to invest in making the alternatives better (particularly the open alternatives). Give people a better option, and we won't have to "kill" Google; the market will do it for us.

No, that's not the real answer at all, it's anything but.

You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:

> A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.

> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.

> Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.

You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.

>We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.

So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.

> The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.

> You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech

Except Google pretty much doesn't operate in China and shareholders seem fine with that.

Because Google never made such profits in China even when they did operate there, neither do they really have the opportunity to do so, even if they'd comply with everything they'd be asked of.

Entirely different from their EU operations to just give one example.

Not for long if the EU government keeps raiding it for billions.

EU social welfare programs are all in a precarious state and the EU is currently taking on massive debts to re-arm again. Their economy is also not growing and China is eating their lunch economically (autos, manufacturing, industry).

Public opinion has turned so dramatically against big tech that triggering $10B in fines is like taking candy from a baby. Expect this to 10X by the end of the decade.

The incentive structure is there and the EU has already realized they can raid US companies in the name of 'privacy' without much pushback (hilariously, they're also constantly trying to undermine encryption at the same time...so we know they don't actually care about "privacy," just easy money).

It’s not so much privacy as data ownership.

That would really require an absolutely dramatic escalation of the fines, as the current ones - even the Meta €1.2 billion fine they got in 2023 - are absolute drops in the ocean compared to even just their yearly EU profit.

And the reality is that the US government would start blackmailing the EU long before that dramatic escalation is reached.

Ah yes. "privacy" in quotes. Because these supranational megacorps should just be allowed to do anything and everything. And any attempt to reign them in is a raid.

This kind-of sort-of already happens now with Big Model / AI release. Rest of the world already gets features & model drops much much before the EU does.

I am honestly interested in any examples you might have, cause I do spend a bit of effort keeping up with whether LLM releases are delayed or lack certain features in EU member states specifically and know no recent example of that.

GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 were released across the same time frame (staggered releases that affect users even within regions not withstanding) for EU and US customers.

ChatGPT Agents meanwhile had a three week delay, but that was not EU specific and affected other countries such as Switzerland as well. Previously, I have also seen the very much not EU UK included in such delayed releases.

Essentially, all recent LLM releases I am aware off either dropped simultaneously for EU and US customers or, if they were inaccessible within the EU early on, that generally included none-EU countries with different or no applicable regulation as well. Any example of differences in accessible features I know of hasn't been limited to EU member states.

I think image/video generation models tend to get released later? And some subscription products?

Just checked, the releases of Dall-E 3, GPTImageGen, Google Veo 2, Imagen 3 and 4, took place simultaneously for EU and US as part of global launches.

Sora was the only outlier here, though as always, the restrictions did not encompass just the EU and were lifted shortly there after, just like with ChatGPT Agents:

> Right now, users can access Sora everywhere ChatGPT is available, with the exception of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area. We are working to expand access further in the coming months.

But that's great for capitalism and competition, isn't it? Ethical startups popping up left and right to take over from big evil incumbent. What a market to seize.

Why would people find it unpopular, they're not a monopoly, there's alternatives. Oh wait