AND NO ONE WILL MISS IT WHEN IT'S GONE:

That so many of the Web companies that "dominate the everyday lives of Europeans," as Ms. Gebhardt frets, originate in the U.S. owes exactly nothing to the U.S. government identifying and fostering the potential of startups.

Google rightly says competition is only a click away: In its short life, Google has seen much of its potential market clicked away by companies whose arrival was unpredictable, such as Yelp, Twitter , Facebook, WhatsApp and an amazingly reinvented Apple.

Contributing next to nothing to this explosion of wealth has been the European Union. Germany and France are the core powers of the EU, the world's No. 4 and 5 economies. Name a single major Web-era success that emerged from either.

Let's amend that: These countries do produce cutting-edge entrepreneurs, engineers and creative talents, who can be found by the thousands in the U.S.

Speaking of sad and pathetic, even as Europe takes aim at Silicon Valley, apparently dropped from the agenda is what was supposed to be its well-developed antitrust case against Russia's Gazprom .

Gazprom is a monopoly of the malign textbook definition, using its pricing power and energy-starvation threats to prevent client countries from developing alternate suppliers. Gazprom's monopoly is detrimental to European consumers in every way, driving up energy prices and driving manufacturing jobs to the U.S. to benefit from cheap shale gas.

Not only is Gazprom an untrustworthy supplier, it's an instrument of Vladimir Putin 's retrograde and militaristic foreign policy. So the European Parliament declares war on Google.

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