[Sylos]

Not sure what you need an explanation for. By now a quite significant portion of internet traffic is delegated over Google and a quite significant portion of commerce depends on the internet.

Google could decide to suddenly stop displaying links to the webpages of companies in your country, which would severely damage your country's export.

They could filter the search results to only display negative search results for things in your country or even add in some faked articles bubbling up into the Google top results about some contagious disease in your country to wreck tourism.

Other great articles to fake would be about some financial instabilities in your country. Traders have to react quickly when something like that crops up, and so they would probably already try to sell assets in your country before anything is even vaguely confirmed.

Chances are that even some TV shows, newspapers etc. will report about it and give it more credibility, as even journalists today also often just google things and then report whatever sounds somewhat plausible, especially when it sounds like a good story.

[smokeyj]

> Google could decide to suddenly stop displaying links to the webpages of companies in your country

This is the crux of your argument. Google already pulled out of China because of prohibitive regulation which makes my point exactly. The more regulation that's added to make search "safe" the greater the barrier to entry for new competitors is. This isn't even theoretical free-market mumbo jumbo, this is simply historically evident.

> They could filter the search results to only display negative search results

Sure. If I search for xbox, they could decide to only show me nintendo results. But the result sucks and I'll move to a different search engine. The market is wonderfully magical that way. Consumers don't need Microsoft's benevolent lobbyists to protect us from the dangers of Google.

So my point is, the motivation for these regulators action is not from the interest of the general public - but more like the well financed interests of market competitors who can't win by providing better results.