There is definitely a strong case that technological acceleration could result in certain countries pulling so far ahead that others can never catch up. The tools of one generation build the next generation. If business owners and society don't have access to those tools they don't get to participate in creating the new stuff.
I'm not sure the Google issue is the best example of Europe's regulatory issues.
- To some extant at least a little of the aggressiveness, or at least the political will and approval, relates to the US implementing and enforcing US regulations on Europe's banking sector. This was not a small nor inconsequential.
- I personally thought Google was going to get hit by fairly big US regulatory anti-trust actions back in 2008-09 but it never happened. I never bought Google stock specifically because of this and I was completely wrong - so I could be very wrong about other conclusions I am making now.
- Ben Edelman provided convincing evidence that not only was Google hard coding certain results for their own products in their favor but explicitly lying about it publicly. There are a few analogies for this, but it basically involves consumer deception which is as bad or worse than not labelling ads or sponsored content because of the monopoly position Google holds. Kind of like if a company owned a GPS 90% of cars used and redirecting directions to businesses they owned. http://www.benedelman.org/hardcoding/
- No evidence but I am fairly confident that the Alphabet corporate reorganization was a pre-emptive action to losing an EU anti-trust case. Google will split apart a "Google Europe" entity which follows whatever rules the EU tells them. It is plausible it could be 3 or 4 entities depending on what the EU finally decides - Goole Search Europe, Google Ads Europe, Youtube Europe, etc. I don't know anything about the legal aspects of this, but it is similar to re-arranging assets while anticipating a future bankruptcy.
- A good example of everyone being way behind the curb is Google News mobile switching to favoring AMP and basically usurping all previous ad revenue sources news organizations had.
- There is a lot of discussion of price discovery and market discovery, but much of tech's innovation in recent years has involved regulatory discovery. The EU stuff absolutely could have occurred 5 years ago. The amount of money Google made by ignoring potential regulatory action likely far offsets the end punishment thanks to compounding growth. Regulators in all countries should think really hard about the line between really bad stuff and shades of grey because tech entrepreneurs are watching Google, Uber, and AirBNB and are behaving accordingly.