Let's look at things in perspective. Axel Springer with EUR2.8B revenue and 13,000 employees and few million readers is a modest size company, and not that impo

Let's look at things in perspective. Axel Springer with EUR2.8B revenue and 13,000 employees and few million readers is a modest size company, and not that important to German economy, much less to European. Certainly less important to Europe than Google is to America ($60B revenue, 50,000 employees, billions of users, facilitating foreign intelligence etc.). Further, it is likely to be even less important in the future since it's in a shrinking industry. Most of the revenue of Springer is still from print media. Also, please note that the Germans take up less than 13 percent of the seats in the European Parliament. I am neither German nor American. I don't hate Google and I use its services regularly. But German interest in splitting up Google is certainly smaller than American interest in keeping it together. It's not like there is a single German (or European) company ready to take over search (or email or video or smart phones) if Google was split up. And Google's monopoly in Europe is extreme. All web businesses spend a significant amount of time optimizing for this one gatekeeper. If you are not visible on Google, you are out of business. 90 percent of searches in many European countries are on Google. Not because it's much better than it's competitors any more, but because of habits and that it owns the platforms (Android, Chrome). The only challengers to Google that I have seen in the last 10 years is Apple and Facebook. As I remember it, Google benefitted when Microsoft was forced to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and again when Microsoft was forced to give users a clear choice not to use Microsoft search in Internet Explorer. The mother of all antitrust cases what that which ended with the breaking up Standard Oil, the Google of its time. The European parliament doesn't have the authority to break up Google but the EU certainly has the authority to do so, and in general to regulate the businesses that operate in Europe. Personally, I'd rather have EU force Google and the other digital giants to pay taxes in Europe on their vast European profits. In a few years Google will likely be less important due to new technological developments, just like Standard Oil probably would have been less of a monopoly after WWI even without being broken up due to new technologies like electricity (instead of kerosene).