I really abhor this recent escalation, and hope this will be a transient phenomenon. But if things came to the worse, the EU would just have to emulate China.

I really abhor this recent escalation, and hope this will be a transient phenomenon. But if things came to the worse, the EU would just have to emulate China. China seems to manage just fine without Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon. Make life difficult for foreign competitors, and let the internal market take care of the rest. No need for a top down approach. The thing is that most internet companies are big due to network effects, not because the underlying technology is hard to replicate. Ban Facebook in the EU, and we would have a new version in a few months. Ditto for Twitter. Google is a bit more challenging, but it would be possible to get a 'goodish' clone going in a short while. (The same would not be the case for Intel, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Altera, etc... These companies do have something that is hard to replicate, and goes beyond network effects).