“Threat” is a word rarely associated with the Internet in America, where a free web is seen as a tool for spreading liberty: The Internet is a force for good. While happy to use it, Europeans feel uneasy about such a powerful tool being left unregulated. For them, the force for good is the state which, through democratic institutions, is supposed to protect them from threats.

Another major difference, obviously, is privacy, which history has taught Europeans to cherish. Is it a coincidence that George Orwell was British, not American? As the debate on the right to be forgotten shows, the great philosophical battle of the Internet, freedom of speech versus privacy, is now underway. So far, Europeans and Americans dissent on how to balance these two fundamental rights. But the amount of de-referencing requests received by Google from European Union users (almost 180,000 since May), with the French and Germans as top requesters, shows that this issue cannot be treated lightly.

This is only the beginning. Take a closer look at what Google is working on these days, well beyond Gmail, Google Earth or Google+, and soon our byzantine arguments about whether de-referencing should apply to google.fr, to the 28 European domains, or globally to google.com will look trivial. We are now entering the age of Google Brain, Google X, Calico, biotechnologies and artificial intelligence, in which the Silicon Valley giant is making major investments. This is also uncharted territory. More ethical and philosophical questions will be raised, on which Google and Europeans will probably differ.

In a fascinating interview at the end of October with The Financial Times, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, was asked whether a private company, rather than governments, should be throwing its weight behind some of the most ambitious science projects. “Well,” he retorted, “somebody’s got to do it.” With $62 billion in cash and equivalents, Google is certainly in a better position than many debt-ridden governments. “How do we use all these resources ... and have a much more positive impact on the world?” Mr. Page mused.

One is left to wonder how Google, beyond “do no evil,” will decide what is a “positive impact” for the rest of the world. Will it be the google.com way? In the rest of the world, we have google.fr, google.de, google.sg or google.co.in. There is no google.us: Americans use google.com. And google.com is also good for the rest of the world. But as we now see, it is not so easily one-size-fits-all. Nor goodfortheworld.com.