How Google's mortal enemy, EU has done it a $95 bn favour in ad sales

The EU fined Alphabet this week, but Europe's new GDPR rules appear to be strengthening the search giant's grip on digital ads

As far as Alphabet Inc.’s Google is concerned, the EU taketh away but it giveth too.

The first part of that was made clear this week when Brussels antitrust cops whacked the search giant with a 4.3 billion-euro ($5 billion) fine over its bundling of apps on the Android mobile operating system – a decision that might restrict the company’s access to the mobile browsing data that is its lifeblood.

Yet Google has reason to offer thanks to bureaucrats elsewhere within the EU, namely the ones who came up with the idea for Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. While that