Europe has good reasons to fear Google

[Commentary] What the European Parliament is proposing sounds like Ayn Rand’s worst nightmare. Let’s take Google, one of the best and most cohesive set of web services we have, and fragment it into smaller businesses. Let’s introduce friction and bureaucracy between the various parts so that lesser companies with worse products can have a chance to compete. It feels like a classic case of over-regulation -- penalizing a successful company for the crime of being better than everyone else -- however its fundamental premise is not wrong: Google is too powerful. The Randian nightmare scenario of Google having to break up is unlikely to ever come to pass, but the company does need to change. If Google is to continue serving as the gateway through which most internet queries pass, it must be held to a standard of fairness that’s above and beyond that required of a private company.