If American companies don’t respect Europe regulation it’s time to Europe invest in dedicated software competing with office 365, social networks, even android/apple/windows os.
We should have learned that the USA can't be trusted when Nixon ended bretton woods so it didn't have to give France it's gold back.
“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”
Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.
You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
They did so quite a few times, and then they let the home-grown alternatives be bought out by US capital.
Now the same EU countries are waking up and realizing that having pieces of your digital infrastructure in someone else's hands was bad bet but unfortunately, it will take decades to build the same thing in the EU.
But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
Governments tend to write the legislation of everything under their purview and they don't really have to deal with forces of nature so they think they can just decree water to not be wet and that's sorted then. So their resulting solutions tend to be pretty awful. Oh and the decision makers tend to be there because they're great at spouting hot air, not because they have a clue what they're doing. Not fun projects to work on.
Most corporates are much more flexible. They come to you with a vision and you discuss how to best make this happen. And an 'Actually, it would be a lot simpler if you do ...' is very appreciated.