Unfortunately, @James Thornton, you couldn't be further off. EU is not competing in the "AI Arms Race", as you put it. And while the EU fined Google, so did Australia and the US govt itself, too. The US govt itself is demanding of dividing of the company. The bottom line is, Google is making contracts against the law, not following previous court orders and is, well, generally, not giving a rat's ass about the law. The news in this circus is Trump and his reaction.

An all-time low, @James Thornton, to assume and to jump into Ad Hominem. I'm not even going to amuse myself with your poor arguments about "hate"; let's just agree that my feelings are irrelevant to the facts. A question: What exactly is the EU in with the "AI Arms Race", as you put it? With Mistral? Aleph Alpha? Please... We both know neither has anything to race the US leaders with. I repeat, you couldn't be further off. And let me explain why. The fine has nothing to do with AI. The causality is your subjective view, and most likely fueled by your personal views of the world: "AI is the new oil, hence everyone's competing for it." Here's a newsflash for you, though: The law in the EU is not altered by the national interests, as in some third-world countries. You break the law, you pay the price - it really is that simple. There are plenty of summits in the EU every year. That's not proof of anything. Like I mentioned above, and like Guy also stated above, the real news is Trump (a head of state) threatening an allied continent for daring to apply its own laws to an American company. - This isn’t about Europe’s digital weakness. - It’s not a tech arms race. - It’s not even about who wins in AI. It’s about political interference, double standards, and the breakdown of respect for the rule of law when the law applies to the "wrong" company. All while the "national prides" sits at the dinner table with the head of state. https://www.euronews.com/2025/09/05/elon-musk-sidelined-from-donald-trumps-white-house-dinner-with-us-tech-executives If you're about to argue, at least keep it civil and to the facts.

@James Thompson or even more so, compliance-product-market fit. Not caring about the regulations is a dead-sure way to exclude oneself from the serious business. Tinkering aside, if all you can say about GDPR-compliance is "Voiceflow says it's compliant" without understanding that compliance isn't a checkbox, the McD awaits. the regulations are not getting any looser, and the rest of the world is watching - and catching.

@Jantore Suleimenov You misread my post. I'm not criticising the regulation, I'm criticising the builders who don't bother to study the market. Furthermore, your statement about "over-regulation" in the West is simply a distortion of perception, most likely caused by a subjective point of view. Mistral is French, Aleph Alpha is German, NVIDIA is partnering with Deutsche Telekom, and so on and so forth. Every Single Major AI initiative and venture comes from... where? From the West. It is plausible that the VC-bias affects the market, but unlikely so much - any initiative worth investing gets funded (again, subjective opinion about what is worth the investment does not count). It's not regulation that's holding European builders back, it's the lack of understanding and respect for the unique demands of this market. If no-code tools and API spaghetti is all the builders have to offer, they'll be flipping burgers after 2027. because the EU AI Act isn't a suggestion. It's the new reality.