Google has begun testing removing EU-based news publishers in Google News, Google Search, and Google Discover for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain (not France). Google is doing this to provide data on the impact this will make for these publishers if this would be rolled out to 100% of users.
They usually request data that can be obtained from their business data, bookkeeping etc. Doing such a survey work shouldn’t be neccessary for answering the EU’s questions.
IMHO it smells.