The EU's Digital Markets Act requires Google to share anonymized search data with competitors to level the playing field in search. Google's initial compliance offer was useless because their anonymization stripped out the data's value, so EU regulators had to design a better approach that protects user privacy while keeping the data actually useful.

• Google's 90% search market share in Europe gives it massive advantages in machine learning—they can see what people search for, what they click, and how long they stay on results, which competitors desperately need but don't have.
• Google deliberately crippled their first anonymization proposal to comply with the DMA in name only; competitors rejected it because the data was worthless for improving search engines.
• The EU's solution uses both technical measures (modifying the data itself) and non-technical measures (contractual restrictions, employee oversight) to reduce re-identification risk to acceptable levels while preserving enough data utility for competitors to actually build better search engines.