The greatest hope of European regulators cracking down on Google's business practices is that the rest of the world becomes a little more like China and its flourishing technology industry. It is hard to imagine the European bureaucrats' dreams will come true.
In China, government restrictions and Google's strategic decisions have left the country's technology market to operate almost free from the search giant's grip for years. As a result, Google's web search is a bit player. Local companies dominate internet searches and just about every other technology imaginable. They have sold billions of smartphones running modified versions of Google's Android software, but without Google's apps or app store. Homegrown companies have sprung up to create valuable, innovative consumer technology services that are seeding ideas for the rest of the world.
China's technology explosion might have happened even if Google had been able to thrive there, but it certainly didn't hurt that the company's hands were shackled. That is the scenario that European antitrust officials had in mind on Wednesday when they slapped Google parent company Alphabet Inc. with a fine of 4.34 billion euros ($5 billion) and ordered it to change how it treats Android.
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