bans and limits just hurt consumers and freedom of speech. data regulation is useless as you said. what china actually did is a lot better.

they ignored decades worth of friedman inspired economic "theory" and started directly investing in their own industry. most successful chinese tech companies are a joint venture between state owned, municipal and private capital. you can get loans way under market rate if you have a good business plan in a industry the government is treating as a priority.

in america every time someone like obama or biden tried they got shut down by big money interests. any investment is bad because its "picking winners and losers". subsidies are bad because the only way to pay for them is increasing taxes and thats bad for profits. europe should never go down that path.

FWIW the EU is a basically a large subsidies-handing body. They do pick winners (like with solar companies) but it did not work.