What would Google have to do to ignore this fine? If they cut any physical presence in the EU, would the EC have any way to enforce this fine?
Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries?
Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an explicitly non-hostile legal environment for companies, where they won't get in trouble for e.g. promoting their own services or offering services for free [1].
Google as assets in the EU, and Google has liabilities with EU banks.
The EU could simply seize Google's servers and intellectual property, and sell it to fund this.
Additionally, if you'd create a jurisdiction just to avoid the law, you can expect that no country will protect your copyright. You'd have the EU courts support every person stealing your IP.
You really don't want to pick a fight with a legal system that your entire business depends on.
Google could remove any presence they had in the EU, at huge expense (closing Google Dublin, abandoning all EU revenue); but that would also remove their ability to use Ireland and the Netherlands as tax havens. They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.
Yawn... Google isn't going to give up a double-digit percentage of their market to indulge these sorts of nationalistic revenge fantasies.
The EU has strong legal institutions, and is a democracy ruled by law, with standards at least as good as the US.
They aren't any more hostile to businesses than the US, which has basically identical antitrust laws. Find the list of EU antitrust actions, and you'll see they take actions against EU companies far more often than companies from non-EU countries, almost perfectly aligned with representation in the EU market. You just don't hear about some Italian steel mill being fined in US media.
The US is already much of the way towards that non-hostile legal environment, which as you can see in many comments here is making many people very sure the EU is doing the right thing.
Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries?
Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an explicitly non-hostile legal environment for companies, where they won't get in trouble for e.g. promoting their own services or offering services for free [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/03/google-fi...