The European Union (EU) cannot keep itself from overregulating the digital world. Last month, the European Commission (EC) published a proposal to compel Google Search to share data with competing digital services. “With this public consultation, we want to hear from the market on the most effective ways for Google to share search data with competing online search engine providers, to continue our push for innovation and fair competitiveness,” stated Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy. The EU seeks simultaneously to benefit consumers and to goose “competition,” but the two aims contradict one another. Google Search data, handed over to competitors, might prop up those competitors (which have, to date, failed to market digital services of Google Search’s quality). But enforced data sharing—whatever degree of ersatz competition it might bring—endangers consumers.
Data shared with Google’s competitors requires, in effect, that users’ search information—reflective of their private lives and thoughts—be littered across the internet, irrespective of the intentions of the recipients of those data. Google laid out the case starkly: “Hundreds of millions of Europeans trust Google with their most sensitive searches—including private questions about their health, family, and finances—and the Commission's proposal would force us to hand this data over to third parties, with dangerously ineffective privacy protections,” Clare Kelly, the company’s senior competition counsel, said in a statement. What, precisely, the median Google Search user expects the company to do with his search data cannot be determined in definite terms, but serial data-sharing would violate the trust implicit between platform and user.
The EC will endeavor to anonymize the data given over to Google Search’s competition. The technological facts of the internet, however, usually render online anonymity a fiction. When going online, users leave trails of data, like the dots in a connect-the-dots book. The dots can, in most cases, be connected, if only somebody attempts it. For example, a “key risk [of the EU’s Google Search scheme] involves correlating shared search data with external datasets,” reports CyberInsider. “Since the feed includes clicked URLs and interaction timing (albeit generalized), entities with access to website analytics or tracking scripts could potentially match search records with visitor logs.” On the internet, the fact that you are a dog may not be immediately visible, but a little sleuthing very often reveals the truth.
The EU, which justifies its regulatory interventionism on the basis of “competition,” misunderstands the purpose of things. Competition works to stimulate the productive powers of an economy. In turn, “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,” as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations. That is, competition policy exists not to prop up small firms, or to maintain some optimal number of competitors in a given industry as determined by technocrats, but to interdict truly anticompetitive conduct that prevents the best goods and services from coming to market. Competition policy rightly understood does not help nor hinder this or that company, but places general rules upon industries to safeguard and facilitate the work done by the invisible hand.
The European regulatory psychology has a distinctly protectionist streak—and a resulting antipathy toward American firms. The continent’s technology sector has stagnated, while Silicon Valley has flourished. Yet, even as Europe’s ire radiates outwards, and ever more of its regulations encumber American firms, the sickness lies within its own legal structures. “The EU assumes that lack of data is what holds back European tech firms,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Jamison writes. “In reality, overregulation is the bigger problem—and the EU’s strategy doubles down on it.” America’s tech sector has flourished—dominated, even—because it was conceived in liberty and still operates within a sensible and light-touch regulatory regime.
Meanwhile, Europe’s technology industry has labored under an asphyxiating regulatory regime, which forecloses innovation. The successes of America cannot be challenged by the Europeans because the EU has chosen to distinguish itself by its regulation, and not its industry. Control and entrepreneurial dynamism cannot be had in equal measure: invigorating the one enfeebles the other.
Since returning to office, President Trump has worked to dismantle Europe’s regulatory predation. However, his Department of Justice in 2025 attempted—albeit unsuccessfully—to impose a data-sharing regulation on Google Search. The administration includes a faction committed to continuing America’s current dominance in tech and one skeptical of Big Tech and eager to hamstring it. A reliable maxim of tech policy is to avoid copying the Europeans, and the latest data-sharing proposal ought to convince American officials to abandon any thought of advancing a similar measure.
