The worst thing a company can do is try to sell you more soap. The government on the other hand can literally ruin your life (or even end it in some countries).
The EU is doing a fantastic job of keeping everyone distracted by pointing the finger at the "evil American tech companies" while simultaneously doing the opposite when it comes to privacy from government...which is the real threat.
I could point to many instances of this but the easiest one is the EU commission currently pushing a ban on encryption.
The more European point of view is that companies are run by greedy people on who we have no control and we need the government to keep those in check. We have control over the governments and it's O.K. to take them down by force from time to time.
Mass protests are a thing and we vote quite often on who are those "government people", what control we have over the companies? It's very scary to let some businessmen to run the the stuff that our lives depend on. Why trust Musk, Gates, Tim Cook or any other magnate act in our benefit when they all show monopolistic tendencies, profit over human lives and rent seeking?
I don't know if the Europeans or Americans are right about it but overall it appears that the Europeans are having it better despite the stats about money showing smaller amounts of it.
Riots don't necessarily need to achieve an objective. It creates a political and economical cost to politicians. It means that you can't simply ignore the minority only because you currently have a majority, so it forces them to consider a compromise good enough. That's not always possible but it's essentially what separates France from Turkey. In Turkey, Erdogan wins the elections by %51 and completely ignores the %49 because they can't win an election and can't disrupt the public anymore.
>You are naive if you think Europeans have any semblance of control
Who do you think has control?