Google Analytics is the best analytics tool out there.
By getting their companies off GA, European governments are weakening their industry.
This probably holds true for many SAAS products. Many of the best are from the USA. Forbidding European companies to use them is a desaster for the European internet industry.
There are many niche systems that fit specific purposes. Sure GA can benefit from scale and existing profiles with user data gatherer in other context, which a self-hosted solution would not have acces to. But does it address every need better than specific systems? And is the added benefit worth sacrificing your users' data to google?
Google Analytics is hugely overrated. Most people don't use it properly, many browsers block it entirely, and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs.
Saying so just tells me that you never been analyzing and optimizing websites with millions of users. Websites on which a whole company depends on. It would be a crazy approach to try and do it via server logs.
Actually, there are some nice tools (e.g. GoAccess) that produce pretty graphs. The vast majority of people just want pretty graphs; the more fancy data Google Analytics produces is nowhere near as accurate as the number of trailing non-zero digits would have you believe.
Depending on your userbase, the regular traffic data can be off by significant proportions. I've seen pages where the number of logged-in interactions are higher than the number of Google Analytics hits.
> and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs
Yes, if you only want to count visits and don't have a problem having all bot traffic included. For everything a bit more advanced you need a proper analytics tool.
Filtering out bot traffic is easy enough with server logs. A self-hosted JavaScript analytics tool gives you more data, but Google Analytics filters out Firefox users too; contrary to ReCAPTCHA's apparent beliefs, Firefox users are mostly not bots.
By getting their companies off GA, European governments are weakening their industry.
This probably holds true for many SAAS products. Many of the best are from the USA. Forbidding European companies to use them is a desaster for the European internet industry.