Silicon Insider: Why Google Can't Do Gmail in Europe

The circus had already moved on, but not for the European Union. With Microsoft already on the mat, the European Commission moved to take it out of the game forever. It failed, but less from will than lack of competence. Does anyone doubt that it would have broken up Microsoft if it had the power?

Why the virulence? Because Microsoft represented to the EU the unholy trilogy: It was a near-monopoly (not in itself a bad thing), it was in technology (where Europe was losing ground) and it was American (the clincher). Had Microsoft been based in, say, Frankfurt, the European Union would have been subsidizing it, not suing it. Frankly, had Microsoft been headquartered in St. Petersburg or Beijing or Bombay it still might have gotten a slap on the wrist. But not Redmond, Wash., U.S.A.

I got a glimpse of this attitude at the beginning of the decade when I was in the United Kingdom for my annual Oxford event. There, the anger toward, and the fear of, Microsoft was palpable, and no amount of my dismissing that company's future competitive threat, did anything to allay those emotions. Microsoft had to be stopped, by any means necessary. And the subtext was: We simply cannot allow the Americans to have this much power over any part of our lives.

Now it's Google's turn. I saw this one coming two years ago, and I could have told you ahead of time just how this Gmail case would turn out.

The first time I encountered Europe's fear of the Google boogeyman was a couple years ago at the same Oxford event. There, the editor of the Guardian, that in-house newsletter of all things anti-American, got up and asked one of the panelists, a Google vice president, just what Europe could do to stop him.

It sounded like a typical snarky U.K. media question, but behind it was something more ominous. At any given moment, some fast-moving and dynamic U.S. company is chosen as the locus of all that Europe fears about American entrepreneurship, power and confidence. And from that moment forward it would be Google … and the EU would bring everything to bear to crush it: subsidized home-grown competitors, targeted regulations to circumscribe its efforts, and, when all else failed, a trial before some Brussels tribunal.