Among the great things about the World Economic Forum conference at Davos in Switzerland are the chance meetings. You never know which people you will bump into, but you know they will be interesting.

In this photo, I was deliberately trying to bump into Google chairman Eric Schmidt. But as you can see, Schmidt was deep in conversation with a guy in a spotted bow tie and a suit vest covered in spooky rune symbols, on the left ...

Estonia president Toomas Hendrik Ilves (left) talks to Eric Schmidt of Google (right) in Davos, 2015. Jim Edwards

I introduced myself to Schmidt, and we said hello and shook hands. But Schmidt was way more interested in what Mr. Spotted Bow Tie was saying. The guy on the right with the backpack is a Google PR person and he told me that they weren't going to do any media interviews. But Schmidt was in a public area of the conference, Spotted Bow Tie man really had Schmidt's ear, and so a bunch of us listened in. This kind of thing happens a lot at Davos — people just sort of grab you and pull you into conversations.



So naturally, I stayed to listen.

At first, I couldn't figure out why Schmidt was so interested in what Spotted Bow Tie was saying. He seemed to be complaining to Schmidt about the prices of iTunes and Netflix. I didn't catch it all, but the gist seemed to be something to do with the issue of dealing with all the different pricing structures in Europe. There are, after all, at least six major currencies here despite the European currency "union."

I assumed — because of the bow tie and rune waistcoat — that the man was some sort of quirky tech billionaire who no longer cared what people thought of the way he dressed.

Wrong!

Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, and Satya Nadella at Davos. Jim Edwards His name badge identified him as Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia. Now this was starting to make sense: Estonia is a tech startup hotbed, especially its capital Tallinn. TransferWise has a big office there. His waistcoat is also quite famous, and you can see a better picture of it here.

More significantly, Ilves also used to be a member of the European Parliament. He now sits on the Council on CyberSecurity's Advisory Board. The EU is debating whether Google is a monopoly and whether the EU should require that Google be broken up as an antitrust measure, so you can see why Schmidt might have a lot of patience for Ilves. Also, the pair have met before.

As I said, I didn't catch the whole thing, but I did hear Schmidt say one interesting thing: "What Europeans don't like is America telling them what to do."

This is a truism, but it is nonetheless true. There is greater hostility to Google in Europe than there is in the US, in part because it's an American company rather than a European one. Schmidt's comment made me think that while it is unlikely the EU will actually require that Google be broken up, he at least understands that on the other side of the Atlantic, Google is a foreign entity and thus needs to tread carefully.