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.
That was my first thought as well, but per the article it sounds like EU regulators requested that data from Google.
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.