How Secure Is Google's Data Bank?

Google's policies and its violations of EU privacy regulations look like the beginning of a miserable slog for the company as it wrestles with investigators, regulators, and politicians.

BusinessWeek summarized this situation in a recent article:

France's National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties will announce its conclusions tomorrow… [various other] regulators may then decide to pursue their own cases against the company. As a result, the matter may not end with France for Google, said Nick Graham, a data protection lawyer at SNR Denton in London. "While CNIL's views will be persuasive, other data- protection regulators in other EU countries could take a different line and levy their own sanctions."

This brings up all sorts of questions, the first of which is: isn't the EU, when it comes to regulating commerce, of one EU hive mind? What's with this sudden emergence of individual national entities each doing its own thing? This sounds more like the death of a thousand cuts than it does concise and targeted regulation.