Throwing stone from a glass box eh? If I understand correctly, US is by far the largest services exporter to EU… should EU merely apply the same “tariffs” that US might impose on these goods, some healthy European alternatives would finally gain some ground..
I think you can make a bigger list of US firms that are benefiting from EU laws, like Epic Games, Garmin, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft. But these companies are again also benefiting from maybe other American more established and US protected companies.
None of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products.
The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).
Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
just a nitpick, shouldn't youtube also be "yes, but not really", since there are plenty of alternatives to hosting video. but none have the reach that youtube has, similar to ads?
I would name PeerTube the project and the various PeerTube instances various organizations are running (like for example https://vhsky.cz/) as a good Youtube alternative.
Sure, you might not have all the media on one big convenient pile like on Youtube, but that is kinda the point (with no single pile owner there is no single entity that decideds what goes on the pile or not).
This can only be a fair alternative if a single search can transparently query all instances (an implicit requirement for most users), and there's also an easy, instance-transparent, preferably free way to upload content (requirement for most creators). Once one has the question "which instance should I search/create my account on?", it will be considered a failure.
> We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
please make a successful economic case for a company only making a mobile phone OS, in a world where android exists and china can crank out 100x the devices at 1/10 the price paying $0 per device license fees than eu could.
Digital Service dominance in this case isn't based on some trait of American Exceptionalism - or conversely based off some sort of lack of academic rigour or work ethic in European Entrepreneurship.
Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy.
The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.
Possibly. Until recently, anyone who was in tech wanted to move to the US because there was simply more opportunity. Salaries are higher, chances of making it big are higher, failing is often seen as a positive in the US, etc... The adage that the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU still rings true.
The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences.
On Wikipedia: German chapter is the second largest (>100 FTEs) and collects donations directly, funding root org from them and keeping significant part for its own operations. It’s not exactly an American monopoly.
It does not matter anything in this case. It’s open source, it’s community-driven, and governance structure isn’t a moat. It can be forked in a matter of days, especially given that there exist independent European structures to support it.
Wikipedia is not community driven. About as public as so called public ownership in reality. It is clearly directed by a small group of people, mostly those with enough time on their hands.
Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.
There are clear biases in its content provision, such as its coverage of certain rich people and establishment bodies.
> Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.
Is this some sort of conspiracy theory? It’s just plain wrong. Wikipedia may block certain people, but it’s definitely not anywhere close to majority of editors. It’s easy to create an account and edit almost everything. It does have editorial policy and editors may have certain bias, but it has nothing to do with the fact, that you mentioning Wikipedia as some American monopoly were wrong.
Have you ever tried to edit Wikipedia using WiFi, mobile networks etc? Because then you will almost always get a message saying you are blocked and cannot edit. I get this all the time, and not because of anything I have done personally. Many people are on shared IPs now.
Even the computers at the National Library of Scotland are blocked, even though there is a paid Wikipedian on their staff and you have to have a membership to use the library.
Give us a break with the "conspiracy theory" mantra. This isn't even a theory. It's commonplace reality. They want everyone to sign up to a Wikipedia account which comes with other issues.
Also Wikipedia is a monopoly. 9/10 when I search for anything nowadays, Wikipedia is at the top. If I only wanted to search for Wikipedia articles I would go straight to their website.
Calling a system that is 90% foss and public domain "owned" by anyone is a bit of a stretch. I can, fully legally, download all the text of Wikipedia for about 130gb and host it myself.
Besides, Jimmy Wales is awesome.
It's an oligarchy in reality and Wikimedia was having a discussion a couple of years ago about implementing the SDGs, which come from the UN and not the public (who are barely aware of them.)
The parent was talking about the scenario where Europe is forced to create alternative (like China) and that it will lead to a better/wider selection for him (I assume he is in the EU) and my answer is that it will lead to only a European selection.
Interestingly, the only people having a wider selection are the ones outside of EU/US/China as they'll be free to pick up whatever they want.
Is that really the case for the EU? The EU doesn’t seem to foster an environment for competitive companies that can operate at the necessary scale the above listed can.
Mostly an artefact of the non-application of antitrust laws, the US selectively decided to not apply those anymore for the past 30-40 years, corporate consolidation takes hold, companies providing a service grow enormously and are allowed to swallow prominent competitors to stamp them out.
The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...
The opposite seems to be the case. The EU fosters really competitive markets, so large companies are really hard to emerge. There are tons of small software shops in my city alone, you can walk through the city and see ads for them in front of their houses.
Those exist in the USA as well. We have large, medium, and small software shops. You hardly ever hear about the medium or smaller ones though, you’ll find the, splattered all over the place in office parks as well as downtown (at least here in the Seattle area). It didn’t feel very different when I lived in Europe, even the large orgs were present (Google has lots of offices in Zurich and Stockholm among others, for example, and when I was in China my wife worked for a German big tech called SAP).
You probably mean Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of Lidl, and their subsidiary StackIT. Yes, they are growing. Schwarz is also building 11B€ AI data center in Lubbenau, so I fully agree with you. We will be fine without American digital services.
A "functioning market" doesn't prevent oligopolies. Oligopolies are natural and optimal (desirable) in many industries, if not most. That's where regulations come in.
You say that like scale is an inevitability. If Microsoft's offerings were unbundled into lots of smaller interoperable solutions we'd all be better off.
Yes, funnily, mutual tariffs on IT services between the EU and USA would incentivize competition, which is a good thing. Unless the EU is try incapable of doing IT right, in which case it would slow the the EU economy, but let’s assume we’ll improve on that.
It seems to be. As in most of the world, nearly everyone is divvied up between Apple and Microsoft, and use Google Search, with Wikipedia being the default place normies go for information. I know there are people who use Linux and prefer to use other search engines, but they are few and far between.
The EU has an extremely fragmented digital internal market, laws that suck for startups in most places, worse capital markets and funding mechanisms (and related laws), and doesn't have a Silicon Valley. It also underinvests in R&D and doesn't have a DARPA.
So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.
On the other hand a lot of these startups and tech companies are a net negative for the world. Externalise problems and pollution, internalise profits. We don't want society to be only decided by those who make the most money. That's why we have those laws.
I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.
I am not gonna comment about others since obviously there are a lot but OVH from europe even though it has flaws still feels like it definitely competes with AWS
There are also hetzner,upcloud,netcup and sooo many other small cloud providers too but OVH,Hetzner,Upcloud,netcup do seem to me competitors of AWS
The tariff talk was ostensibly because the EU exported more goods to the US than the US exported to EU.
The US exports far more digital services to the EU, though.
Understanding those things, it would seem a particularly unwise framing for the US government to focus on EU digital services exports.
LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software, and in particular making it far easier to handle the regulatory compliance and regional fragmentation that have traditionally held back software companies in the EU. Combine that with growing concerns about software trust, and the EU looks like an increasingly attractive bet for future software investment.
Ironic, then, that Europe seems slowest to adopt the very tool that could finally solve its fragmentation problem.
Two governments, two very different strategies to cripple themselves. The race is on.
Are you saying trickle-down economics doesn't work? If those kids could read… what I do wonder is how tens of millions of Americans still think that it's other countries that are to blame for their poverty or struggles. Baffling. If you ARE in the richest country, wouldn't you at least blame something internal?
A major thing that holds us back and will continue to do so in B2B (coming from someone whose last startup failed): differences in language/customs/needs linked to the multitude of cultures in the region.
We hired someone that could sell in Italian, French, and Spanish. Her profile is fairly rare, given she had a good understanding of the customer. I can't believe our CEO let her go simply because of a 4-days at the office obsession…
LLMs can't really fix this. Even though she could speak Spanish, the culture and customer needs for Spain will be a little different than those for Italy. Traditions will be different. She's a wonderful human being, but imagine a customer in France not liking her “Belgian accent” and tanking a sale… She was really losing motivation because of that. The 2 other people on sales struggled more or less with the same issue.
All hail LLMs, if you want, but Europe's issues are not that easily fixed. We end up obsessing about the wrong stuff, as if compliance and regulation was the Big Problem, instead of a boogeyman that neoliberals love to hate.
Yeah the standard advice for European startups is to sell in the US first and worry about the local markets later, language and culture barriers are still huge.
It wouldn't work for us, plenty of entrenched competitors. In the EU? Zero direct competition. We focused on France and expanded later, France is a good enough market for some stuff. Can't imagine trying to compete in the US!
Uh, you're planning to outsource regulatory compliance to an LLM? In the EU? Which has already banned the usage of "algorithms" that aren't "transparent" via the DMA? That isn't going to work.
As for cloning the US software industry with LLMs ... with which non-US LLMs, exactly? Mistral? The best LLMs for coding (which still can't handle many important tasks) are: Gemini, Claude, GPT. All non-EU models.
If American companies don’t respect Europe regulation it’s time to Europe invest in dedicated software competing with office 365, social networks, even android/apple/windows os.
Many EU Governments run entirely on MS/Meta/Amazon and to a lessor extent Google services. Many (most?) government services run on Azure or AWS, and huge parts of the continent run on WhatsApp.
The EU countries had decades to build and foster alternative companies yet they did not manage to do so. China did though.
Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.
You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
That's my point. This was a decision by China. European countries were happy to just let the US in and not have to worry about building their own alternative versions of the US services.
Now the same EU countries are waking up and realizing that having pieces of your digital infrastructure in someone else's hands was bad bet but unfortunately, it will take decades to build the same thing in the EU.
Same with Holland. The tax office is moving away from their own office package onto m365 right now. They apparently had an alternative all this time, which I find very surprising (the media didn't really elaborate on this).
But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
Hell yes I hear you on that. I've been sideways involved with some of their projects too. It's always a minefield because they don't know what they want, what they do think they want makes no sense and they don't care about what's technically possible or is streamlined, maintainable and affordable (us engineers try to find a solution that is also robust and straightforward, not just to tick a maze of boxes).
Governments tend to write the legislation of everything under their purview and they don't really have to deal with forces of nature so they think they can just decree water to not be wet and that's sorted then. So their resulting solutions tend to be pretty awful. Oh and the decision makers tend to be there because they're great at spouting hot air, not because they have a clue what they're doing. Not fun projects to work on.
Most corporates are much more flexible. They come to you with a vision and you discuss how to best make this happen. And an 'Actually, it would be a lot simpler if you do ...' is very appreciated.
The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?
Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!
I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.
"effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture"
Give me an example where Antitrust was actually breaking any monopoly.
In the EU and the Microsoft antitrust case, the remedy was to give the best poison to the competitors (free software Samba in that case) in that case royalties over patents.
Antitrust don't work, fines are too low, remedies are not working, and the administration is biased and politicized.
> The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?
Its not only for monopolists. The first victims of regulatory moat-building are always small businesses and individuals.They cant pay the fines.
A bit of a tangent here. I'm not a native English speaker but is it me or is this text badly written?
> The European Union and certain EU Member States have persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines, and directives against U.S. service providers.
Persisted in a continuing course, saying the same thing twice.
> In stark contrast, EU service providers have been able to operate freely in the United States for decades, benefitting from access to our market and consumers on a level playing field.
"Benefiting" is spelled with one t.
> If the EU and EU Member States insist on continuing to restrict, limit, and deter the competitiveness of U.S. service providers through discriminatory means...
Again, restricting and limiting mean the same thing. Also, can you deter competitiveness?
Benefitting can be spelled with two Ts. It's more commonly a British English spelling, and British English is often taught to non-native speakers in school. Using "harassing" as an adjective is also the kind of mistake non-native speakers make. Probably whoever wrote this tweet didn't learn English in America.
Long term, it would be good for the EU if tech market access was restricted. The reason there aren't EU tech giants is because the US and EU are basically one market, so naturally, all tech giants end up being American. So it's not in the interest of the US to restrict market access in anyway and these tech giants know it.
US would like entire world to adapt American laws, values, norms, morals, life styles, mindset, ethics etc. Any deviation would, ofcourse, be uncomfortable.
Once Europeans will not be distracted by American tech, they will be able to fully focus on the only truly European innovation - investing in real estate.
Is that defense umbrella actually real? Over the last year the US acted less and less as an ally to the point I wouldn't trust to actually help out in case of an attack
Is this all simply spurred on by the recent fine against Musk/X? That wasn’t even about censorship but other issues. Not to mention the irony of threatening market access after throwing high tariffs on key allies while going soft on China.
None of the service providers listed as European delivers B2C products or services as many American ones. Maybe only Spotify.
Few of these companies provide respectable IT/tech careers, every time it's brutal race to the bottom with nearshoring and outsourcing. Especially French and German ones where you have to speak French or German and have local postgraduate degree to step out from the software sweatshop in the basement.
As an EU citizen I don't mind if Americans take them down a notch.
Yay, jackpot! We taunted the monkey in the glass box into throwing the first stone.
The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.
The US sees TikTok as a risk. For the EU, it’s Microsoft Office.
I think the American government is mad at the DMA more than anything. Breaking up the monopolies that are currently firmly held by American tech giants goes directly against the interests of the White House, especially now that they're able to openly bribe the president.
> The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.
That is not even remotely close to the truth. The EU is not itching to get rid of Microsoft nor Windows nor Google. If these companies left tomorrow, the EU will have enormous problems replacing them if that is even possible in the first place.
The EU countries should have had a homegrown version of each US service up and running and on par with their US counterparts a decade ago, then the EU would have had leverage but as it stands, they have none.
Unless you think that every governmental office will switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning, in which case I have a bridge to sell you.
Not to mention that the entire EU's messaging needs are met via US companies. Let's see how long the EU can last without WhatsApp, IMessage and Facebook Messenger.
My guess is not long unless you want to use Telegram which was most likely backdoor-ed by the French government not long ago.
This is the problem with the EU as it stands, there is really no mea-culpa from the institutions for their inaction and getting caught with their pants down.
All of this was foreseeable and could have been avoided, yet here we are.
There wouldn't be as big problem replacing software. It wouldn't take much. But replacing hardware? That is the real problem where you need US (or maybe China, so pick your poison).
Accenture is operating from Ireland, legally speaking. It may be in American hands, serving American shareholders and American interests, and it may have been started as a European front for an American business, but it's technically an EU company.
I don't think those kinds of details matter to a government looking to start yet another trade war, though. The list is based on the question "what legally European tech companies do business in America, sorted by income".
FAANG usually only operate what is necessary to collect payment and maybe do some lobbying on the side. Accenture actually has a full HQ with people on the ground in Europe.
But yes, legally speaking, FAANG is also EU, same way Volkswagen is an American company. That's not really how people tend to talk about these companies, though.
> FAANG usually only operate what is necessary to collect payment and maybe do some lobbying on the side.
Google, Meta, Microsoft do a lot of R&D un Europe. Google more so than the others. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had substantial R&D in Europe as well, although I couldn’t name specific sites like the first three. Maybe you meant big corp instead of FAANG specifically?
Imperfect as they are, the EU has some of the best consumer data privacy protections in the world —GDPR. The US should emulate their model, not pressure the EU to degrade protections.
I really don't mind sitting on a table and discussing things but having the biggest military power on the planet becoming suddenly hostile and pushy like this is really really fucked up.
The problem isn't knowledge workers, we have plenty. The problem is that given the choice between being paid $55k for a EU based company and spend half your salary in rent vs making $200k+ working for a US based company most people chose money. Even without relocating, working for a US based company in Europe makes more sense...
Working for Dassault or Rheinmetall on high tech military equipment will net you less than half what you'd get helping Facebook come up with the most effective way to cram as many ads as physically possible in your fellow citizens' lives... it's like we got our priorities backward and reward things than shouldn't even exist
A lot of people work comfortably for EU companies. Yes, there’s more money somewhere else in this world, but when your income is good enough other things matter more. I think you are exaggerating the problem. Europe can certainly handle building the core tech stack to achieve sovereignty.
The internship I had half way through my studies for a US based company (10+ years ago) paid more than most tech jobs you can land in Paris with a masters degree (right now)... I think you're underestimating the problem. Tech workers are seen as an expense, not a resource, and certainly not as assets.
There are plenty of developer jobs in Europe paying 70k+ €. While salaries may be lower than in the US, your real quality of life can be much better because:
1. Lower food costs. Groceries are cheaper and healthier and eating out is more affordable (+ tipping is not necesary)
2. Generally lower rent. Unless you live outside a few very expensive cities (but it would compensate with higher salaries)
3. No need for a car. Public transport usually costs around 40 to 60 € per month.
4. No need to save for college. Public universities are free or very cheap
5. Healthcare is covered. No huge insurance premiums or surprise medical bills.
6. Less working time. Shorter workweeks, fewer unpaid overtime hours, and stronger limits on burnout.
7. More paid vacation. 25 to 30 days off per year is standard plus public holidays
8. Paid parental leave for both parents without risking your job.
9. Stronger worker protections including notice periods and unemployment benefits.
10. Child benefits and subsidized childcare in many countries.
11. Lower overall stress due to less financial anxiety around health and education.
12. Better work life balance and healthier company culture.
13. High quality public services and safer cities.
14. Easy and cheap travel across many countries.
...
I guess I will stop here.
Lower salary does not mean lower standard of living.
But again you can get all of that and double your salary by working for a US company from europe... All my friends are doing that and are paid 120k+ which no local company would ever pay, that's like exec level salary in most regular local companies.
70k really isn't that much, that's 3500/month net in france or germany, you can already remove 1000-1500 for rent alone if you live in a western EU capital
I make less then 70k€ yearly and I live in a capital and sure I'm not wealthy as fuck but it's perfectly fine.
People need to stop this obssession with getting rich, I know it's because our system glorifies it (and greed), but most people won't get rich (value isn't created magically, if one has a lot, a lot have nearly nothing) and being wealthy is immoral in any cases.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Approx. 6k€ net is way more than enough to live a "decent quality of life" in western Europe, unless you specifically seek out very expensive rent.
I don't think that's true. Have a look at the people who are actually working in the US offices of US companies. There are some Americans but you'll also find plenty of Europeans as well as people from all over the world.
Have a look at where US tech companies offices are. You'll find plenty of them in the EU
It has the knowledge workers but not the capital or laws that make it attractive for them to build tech firms.
Many US tech firms would be either illegal to operate in the EU or legally very difficult. Any social network is a problem to operate in the EU because you are considered fully liable for the speech acts of users regardless of company size.
Now look at web search, YouTube, social media, messaging apps, cloud... they all involve reproducing the speech of users at scale without pre-moderation. So you just can't operate them in Europe without endless legal problems and costs that make you uncompetitive. Even operating something like Hetzner is hard!
So if the EU continues picking fights with the US and access is lost, who in their right mind would sign up for the multi-decade effort to compete with them? It would be an endless nightmare and there's really no point. The EU Commission has absolutely no institutional will or ability to compete with the US in tech or service markets, meaning the EU will absolutely blink first. They are all Outlook and Netflix addicts, all it will take is their wives/husbands/children bitching about how they suddenly can't use the App Store and they'll fold quickly. So anyone dumb enough to try and build up a business that competes with the US firms purely by being EU-homed will get immolated the moment the EU gives up and submits to what the White House wants, which they are 100% guaranteed to do.
The EU can only fine US tech giants because it's good at suffocating its own European companies with some of its members states having one of the highest taxes and subject to the EU's regulations.
It's no wonder AI startups like Mistral (France) are so dependent on US VCs and the same is true with Lovable (Sweden) who were able to grow faster than Europe trying to strangle them.
Since there are rare startup home-runs that are from Europe, the EU instead needs find a way to impose fines on US big tech companies. They (EU) will certainly do the same with the Big AI companies very soon.
You're pretending like the fines target US companies. GDPR fines target malpractice and mishandling of data. The DMC seeks to break up artificial digital market monopolies. These apply to corporations operating in the EU, with no basis on where they operate from. Don't want to get punished for creating an uncompetitive monopoly? Don't create an uncompetitive monopoly.
Throwing stone from a glass box eh? If I understand correctly, US is by far the largest services exporter to EU… should EU merely apply the same “tariffs” that US might impose on these goods, some healthy European alternatives would finally gain some ground..
I think you can make a bigger list of US firms that are benefiting from EU laws, like Epic Games, Garmin, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft. But these companies are again also benefiting from maybe other American more established and US protected companies.
What alternatives to Microsoft, Google, IBM or AWS exist in Europe?
None of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products.
The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).
Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
just a nitpick, shouldn't youtube also be "yes, but not really", since there are plenty of alternatives to hosting video. but none have the reach that youtube has, similar to ads?
I would name PeerTube the project and the various PeerTube instances various organizations are running (like for example https://vhsky.cz/) as a good Youtube alternative.
Sure, you might not have all the media on one big convenient pile like on Youtube, but that is kinda the point (with no single pile owner there is no single entity that decideds what goes on the pile or not).
This can only be a fair alternative if a single search can transparently query all instances (an implicit requirement for most users), and there's also an easy, instance-transparent, preferably free way to upload content (requirement for most creators). Once one has the question "which instance should I search/create my account on?", it will be considered a failure.
https://sepiasearch.org/
Let's hope that jolla and Sailfish OS make a comeback with their current crowdfunded and crowd-vote-engineered phone
"Everything just works together" is, on its own, a single use case.
In that case, Microsoft’s products totally fail this use case.
[dead]
You're actually making the exact point you want to attack.
That's why Europe needs that push to get their act together and start being self-sufficient, digital services-wise.
Digital Service dominance in this case isn't based on some trait of American Exceptionalism - or conversely based off some sort of lack of academic rigour or work ethic in European Entrepreneurship.
Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy.
The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.
If these hadn't been allowed to emerge as monopolies we would have a wider selection.
Possibly. Until recently, anyone who was in tech wanted to move to the US because there was simply more opportunity. Salaries are higher, chances of making it big are higher, failing is often seen as a positive in the US, etc... The adage that the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU still rings true.
The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences.
https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in...
No you would only have the European selection.
There is currently no real European equivalent/serious competitor to the Apple/Microsoft duopoly, Google monopoly, Wikipedia monopoly etc.
On Wikipedia: German chapter is the second largest (>100 FTEs) and collects donations directly, funding root org from them and keeping significant part for its own operations. It’s not exactly an American monopoly.
Wikipedia is American owned. It also pushes certain ideas very subtly. Or not subtly in the hagiographies of certain "philanthropists".
It does not matter anything in this case. It’s open source, it’s community-driven, and governance structure isn’t a moat. It can be forked in a matter of days, especially given that there exist independent European structures to support it.
Wikipedia is not community driven. About as public as so called public ownership in reality. It is clearly directed by a small group of people, mostly those with enough time on their hands.
Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.
There are clear biases in its content provision, such as its coverage of certain rich people and establishment bodies.
> Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.
Is this some sort of conspiracy theory? It’s just plain wrong. Wikipedia may block certain people, but it’s definitely not anywhere close to majority of editors. It’s easy to create an account and edit almost everything. It does have editorial policy and editors may have certain bias, but it has nothing to do with the fact, that you mentioning Wikipedia as some American monopoly were wrong.
Have you ever tried to edit Wikipedia using WiFi, mobile networks etc? Because then you will almost always get a message saying you are blocked and cannot edit. I get this all the time, and not because of anything I have done personally. Many people are on shared IPs now.
Even the computers at the National Library of Scotland are blocked, even though there is a paid Wikipedian on their staff and you have to have a membership to use the library.
Give us a break with the "conspiracy theory" mantra. This isn't even a theory. It's commonplace reality. They want everyone to sign up to a Wikipedia account which comes with other issues.
Also Wikipedia is a monopoly. 9/10 when I search for anything nowadays, Wikipedia is at the top. If I only wanted to search for Wikipedia articles I would go straight to their website.
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> There is currently no real European equivalent to the [..] Wikipedia monopoly
8 out of the 10 largest Wikipedias are European languages...
Wikipedia is an American outfit, owned by the American businessman Jimmy Wales. It doesn't matter which language it is in.
Calling a system that is 90% foss and public domain "owned" by anyone is a bit of a stretch. I can, fully legally, download all the text of Wikipedia for about 130gb and host it myself. Besides, Jimmy Wales is awesome.
Wikipedia does not practice what it preaches. Even the claim "that anyone can edit" is not true.
Wikipedia is open source software serving public domain content. Wales controls the main fundraising outfit and domain, but the rest is not his IP.
It's an oligarchy in reality and Wikimedia was having a discussion a couple of years ago about implementing the SDGs, which come from the UN and not the public (who are barely aware of them.)
The parent was talking about the scenario where Europe is forced to create alternative (like China) and that it will lead to a better/wider selection for him (I assume he is in the EU) and my answer is that it will lead to only a European selection.
Interestingly, the only people having a wider selection are the ones outside of EU/US/China as they'll be free to pick up whatever they want.
Is that really the case for the EU? The EU doesn’t seem to foster an environment for competitive companies that can operate at the necessary scale the above listed can.
Mostly an artefact of the non-application of antitrust laws, the US selectively decided to not apply those anymore for the past 30-40 years, corporate consolidation takes hold, companies providing a service grow enormously and are allowed to swallow prominent competitors to stamp them out.
The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...
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The opposite seems to be the case. The EU fosters really competitive markets, so large companies are really hard to emerge. There are tons of small software shops in my city alone, you can walk through the city and see ads for them in front of their houses.
Those exist in the USA as well. We have large, medium, and small software shops. You hardly ever hear about the medium or smaller ones though, you’ll find the, splattered all over the place in office parks as well as downtown (at least here in the Seattle area). It didn’t feel very different when I lived in Europe, even the large orgs were present (Google has lots of offices in Zurich and Stockholm among others, for example, and when I was in China my wife worked for a German big tech called SAP).
LIDL the supermarket chain is German and is running a large cloud operation inside the EU. And OVH from France is also pretty big.
You’re correct that few EU companies get as large as US monopolies, but that’s kind of the goal when you want a functioning market.
You probably mean Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of Lidl, and their subsidiary StackIT. Yes, they are growing. Schwarz is also building 11B€ AI data center in Lubbenau, so I fully agree with you. We will be fine without American digital services.
It’s going to take time though… and the StackIT PaaS offerings aren’t yet quite as easy to use as their US competitors
A "functioning market" doesn't prevent oligopolies. Oligopolies are natural and optimal (desirable) in many industries, if not most. That's where regulations come in.
You say that like scale is an inevitability. If Microsoft's offerings were unbundled into lots of smaller interoperable solutions we'd all be better off.
Yes, funnily, mutual tariffs on IT services between the EU and USA would incentivize competition, which is a good thing. Unless the EU is try incapable of doing IT right, in which case it would slow the the EU economy, but let’s assume we’ll improve on that.
It seems to be. As in most of the world, nearly everyone is divvied up between Apple and Microsoft, and use Google Search, with Wikipedia being the default place normies go for information. I know there are people who use Linux and prefer to use other search engines, but they are few and far between.
The EU has an extremely fragmented digital internal market, laws that suck for startups in most places, worse capital markets and funding mechanisms (and related laws), and doesn't have a Silicon Valley. It also underinvests in R&D and doesn't have a DARPA.
So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.
On the other hand a lot of these startups and tech companies are a net negative for the world. Externalise problems and pollution, internalise profits. We don't want society to be only decided by those who make the most money. That's why we have those laws.
I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.
A lot. Have a look: https://european-alternatives.eu/
I am not gonna comment about others since obviously there are a lot but OVH from europe even though it has flaws still feels like it definitely competes with AWS
There are also hetzner,upcloud,netcup and sooo many other small cloud providers too but OVH,Hetzner,Upcloud,netcup do seem to me competitors of AWS
Just running Infrastructure is easy enough. Everyone did it before, we still can do it.
Its practical to use GCP, Azure and AWS for sure but yeah they were always market dominant.
Its probably time to say good buy to an old ally who became demented and hostile to europe :(
create a innovation fund by taxing them
starting at 20%, increasing 1% each month until the "liberation day" tariffs are dropped
the innovation fund should be structured build up local competitors to US hyperscalers
The tariff talk was ostensibly because the EU exported more goods to the US than the US exported to EU.
The US exports far more digital services to the EU, though.
Understanding those things, it would seem a particularly unwise framing for the US government to focus on EU digital services exports.
LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software, and in particular making it far easier to handle the regulatory compliance and regional fragmentation that have traditionally held back software companies in the EU. Combine that with growing concerns about software trust, and the EU looks like an increasingly attractive bet for future software investment.
Ironic, then, that Europe seems slowest to adopt the very tool that could finally solve its fragmentation problem.
Two governments, two very different strategies to cripple themselves. The race is on.
> LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software
Can you elaborate on this one? Hopefully with some citations.
Your last sentence is funny as hell because it’s so true
You have to understand who Trump's base is. They think factories> liberals in Seattle.
Globalisation has made America the richest country on the planet. The real problem is that the money doesn't reach the "deplorable" population.
But that is an INTERNAL issue that could have easily be solved with voting for Bernie Sanders.
People vote against their own interests is a tale as old as democracy itself.
Are you saying trickle-down economics doesn't work? If those kids could read… what I do wonder is how tens of millions of Americans still think that it's other countries that are to blame for their poverty or struggles. Baffling. If you ARE in the richest country, wouldn't you at least blame something internal?
A major thing that holds us back and will continue to do so in B2B (coming from someone whose last startup failed): differences in language/customs/needs linked to the multitude of cultures in the region.
We hired someone that could sell in Italian, French, and Spanish. Her profile is fairly rare, given she had a good understanding of the customer. I can't believe our CEO let her go simply because of a 4-days at the office obsession…
LLMs can't really fix this. Even though she could speak Spanish, the culture and customer needs for Spain will be a little different than those for Italy. Traditions will be different. She's a wonderful human being, but imagine a customer in France not liking her “Belgian accent” and tanking a sale… She was really losing motivation because of that. The 2 other people on sales struggled more or less with the same issue.
All hail LLMs, if you want, but Europe's issues are not that easily fixed. We end up obsessing about the wrong stuff, as if compliance and regulation was the Big Problem, instead of a boogeyman that neoliberals love to hate.
Yeah the standard advice for European startups is to sell in the US first and worry about the local markets later, language and culture barriers are still huge.
It wouldn't work for us, plenty of entrenched competitors. In the EU? Zero direct competition. We focused on France and expanded later, France is a good enough market for some stuff. Can't imagine trying to compete in the US!
Uh, you're planning to outsource regulatory compliance to an LLM? In the EU? Which has already banned the usage of "algorithms" that aren't "transparent" via the DMA? That isn't going to work.
As for cloning the US software industry with LLMs ... with which non-US LLMs, exactly? Mistral? The best LLMs for coding (which still can't handle many important tasks) are: Gemini, Claude, GPT. All non-EU models.
If American companies don’t respect Europe regulation it’s time to Europe invest in dedicated software competing with office 365, social networks, even android/apple/windows os.
Many EU Governments run entirely on MS/Meta/Amazon and to a lessor extent Google services. Many (most?) government services run on Azure or AWS, and huge parts of the continent run on WhatsApp.
Which is a huge mistake.
We should have learned that the USA can't be trusted when Nixon ended bretton woods so it didn't have to give France it's gold back.
The EU countries had decades to build and foster alternative companies yet they did not manage to do so. China did though.
Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.
You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
The EU countries had decades to build and foster alternative companies yet they did not manage to do so
They did so quite a few times, and then they let the home-grown alternatives be bought out by US capital.
China blocked (many) US companies though, that enabled/forced the local companies to fill the void.
That's my point. This was a decision by China. European countries were happy to just let the US in and not have to worry about building their own alternative versions of the US services.
Now the same EU countries are waking up and realizing that having pieces of your digital infrastructure in someone else's hands was bad bet but unfortunately, it will take decades to build the same thing in the EU.
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Agreed, and all the worse for being completely foreseeable.
And are rushing to get away! I work on a product thats source available and self hosted. Many of our new customers are EU gov agencies.
Good to hear, but probably depends on the country. Ireland is all-in on Azure and only deepening ties.
Same with Holland. The tax office is moving away from their own office package onto m365 right now. They apparently had an alternative all this time, which I find very surprising (the media didn't really elaborate on this).
But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
Dutch gov is one of our recent customers! govs are big things and have lots of parts that dont always talk to each other.
Hell yes I hear you on that. I've been sideways involved with some of their projects too. It's always a minefield because they don't know what they want, what they do think they want makes no sense and they don't care about what's technically possible or is streamlined, maintainable and affordable (us engineers try to find a solution that is also robust and straightforward, not just to tick a maze of boxes).
Governments tend to write the legislation of everything under their purview and they don't really have to deal with forces of nature so they think they can just decree water to not be wet and that's sorted then. So their resulting solutions tend to be pretty awful. Oh and the decision makers tend to be there because they're great at spouting hot air, not because they have a clue what they're doing. Not fun projects to work on.
Most corporates are much more flexible. They come to you with a vision and you discuss how to best make this happen. And an 'Actually, it would be a lot simpler if you do ...' is very appreciated.
There has never been a smarter time to replace everything you just mentioned.
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The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?
Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!
I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.
"effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture"
Give me an example where Antitrust was actually breaking any monopoly.
In the EU and the Microsoft antitrust case, the remedy was to give the best poison to the competitors (free software Samba in that case) in that case royalties over patents.
Antitrust don't work, fines are too low, remedies are not working, and the administration is biased and politicized.
> The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?
Its not only for monopolists. The first victims of regulatory moat-building are always small businesses and individuals.They cant pay the fines.
A bit of a tangent here. I'm not a native English speaker but is it me or is this text badly written?
> The European Union and certain EU Member States have persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines, and directives against U.S. service providers.
Persisted in a continuing course, saying the same thing twice.
> In stark contrast, EU service providers have been able to operate freely in the United States for decades, benefitting from access to our market and consumers on a level playing field.
"Benefiting" is spelled with one t.
> If the EU and EU Member States insist on continuing to restrict, limit, and deter the competitiveness of U.S. service providers through discriminatory means...
Again, restricting and limiting mean the same thing. Also, can you deter competitiveness?
Authoritarianism selects against competence.
Benefitting can be spelled with two Ts. It's more commonly a British English spelling, and British English is often taught to non-native speakers in school. Using "harassing" as an adjective is also the kind of mistake non-native speakers make. Probably whoever wrote this tweet didn't learn English in America.
Long term, it would be good for the EU if tech market access was restricted. The reason there aren't EU tech giants is because the US and EU are basically one market, so naturally, all tech giants end up being American. So it's not in the interest of the US to restrict market access in anyway and these tech giants know it.
https://xcancel.com/ustraderep/status/2000990028835508258
Remind me to never look at twitter replies again, by far most counterproductive threads I've seen
70% is bot traffic, the rest is brain damaged terminally online human shells.
It really isn't representative of the real world average human intelligence and capacity to debate or even discuss ideas.
I hope the bots get the vote eventually. /s
US would like entire world to adapt American laws, values, norms, morals, life styles, mindset, ethics etc. Any deviation would, ofcourse, be uncomfortable.
> U.S. services companies provide substantial free services to EU citizens
Ignoring that if the service is free, YOU are the product, is childlike
Please destroy US tech, Ursula.
Once Europeans will not be distracted by American tech, they will be able to fully focus on the only truly European innovation - investing in real estate.
You are asking to severely damage the economy of the country providing your defense umbrella, when your continent is mired in a 3+ year land war.
Is that defense umbrella actually real? Over the last year the US acted less and less as an ally to the point I wouldn't trust to actually help out in case of an attack
Remind me again how committed the current administration is to providing a defense umbrella? Have they said anything interesting about it lately?
Keep up. US is not an an ally to any European nation any more.
The US is the only organisation in NATO to ever invoke Article 5.
US is trying to give Ukrainian land away for free to pacify Russia. EU ignored Crimea and Georgia. It didn't work. It won't work now, either.
Hello Reddit
Is this all simply spurred on by the recent fine against Musk/X? That wasn’t even about censorship but other issues. Not to mention the irony of threatening market access after throwing high tariffs on key allies while going soft on China.
None of the service providers listed as European delivers B2C products or services as many American ones. Maybe only Spotify.
Few of these companies provide respectable IT/tech careers, every time it's brutal race to the bottom with nearshoring and outsourcing. Especially French and German ones where you have to speak French or German and have local postgraduate degree to step out from the software sweatshop in the basement.
As an EU citizen I don't mind if Americans take them down a notch.
Yay, jackpot! We taunted the monkey in the glass box into throwing the first stone.
The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.
The US sees TikTok as a risk. For the EU, it’s Microsoft Office.
> the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to)
I think the American government is mad at the DMA more than anything. Breaking up the monopolies that are currently firmly held by American tech giants goes directly against the interests of the White House, especially now that they're able to openly bribe the president.
"I think the American government is mad at the DMA"
It's the not the government, it's the large american companies behind it.
Same thing.
> The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.
That is not even remotely close to the truth. The EU is not itching to get rid of Microsoft nor Windows nor Google. If these companies left tomorrow, the EU will have enormous problems replacing them if that is even possible in the first place.
The EU countries should have had a homegrown version of each US service up and running and on par with their US counterparts a decade ago, then the EU would have had leverage but as it stands, they have none.
Unless you think that every governmental office will switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning, in which case I have a bridge to sell you.
Not to mention that the entire EU's messaging needs are met via US companies. Let's see how long the EU can last without WhatsApp, IMessage and Facebook Messenger.
My guess is not long unless you want to use Telegram which was most likely backdoor-ed by the French government not long ago.
This is the problem with the EU as it stands, there is really no mea-culpa from the institutions for their inaction and getting caught with their pants down.
All of this was foreseeable and could have been avoided, yet here we are.
There wouldn't be as big problem replacing software. It wouldn't take much. But replacing hardware? That is the real problem where you need US (or maybe China, so pick your poison).
Since when Accenture is European? It’s this because these companies are not Palantir?
Accenture is operating from Ireland, legally speaking. It may be in American hands, serving American shareholders and American interests, and it may have been started as a European front for an American business, but it's technically an EU company.
I don't think those kinds of details matter to a government looking to start yet another trade war, though. The list is based on the question "what legally European tech companies do business in America, sorted by income".
By this logic, FAANG is also EU
FAANG usually only operate what is necessary to collect payment and maybe do some lobbying on the side. Accenture actually has a full HQ with people on the ground in Europe.
But yes, legally speaking, FAANG is also EU, same way Volkswagen is an American company. That's not really how people tend to talk about these companies, though.
> FAANG usually only operate what is necessary to collect payment and maybe do some lobbying on the side.
Google, Meta, Microsoft do a lot of R&D un Europe. Google more so than the others. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had substantial R&D in Europe as well, although I couldn’t name specific sites like the first three. Maybe you meant big corp instead of FAANG specifically?
Accenture has its HQ in Dublin - FAANG companies have their HQs in the US?
But their Intelectual Property is located in Ireland :) For numerous helpings of double irish dutch sandwiches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
Being officially HQ-ed in Dublin, Ireland might be the reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
Although it originated in the US its headquarters are in Ireland. Probably solely for tax reasons.
Similarly, what's DHL doing there?
I mean, I know it's headquartered in Germany. But why is it targeted here? Is it because it was once American?
Great, give us more reasons to cut ties with you, uncle sam !
I'm not read reading that whole screed, I just want to know if there's any regulations that apply to America only.
Otherwise, how can words like "discrimination" even be appropriate?
Mutatis mutandis, the same applies in the opposite direction.
Imperfect as they are, the EU has some of the best consumer data privacy protections in the world —GDPR. The US should emulate their model, not pressure the EU to degrade protections.
Ah man i hate the USA...
I really don't mind sitting on a table and discussing things but having the biggest military power on the planet becoming suddenly hostile and pushy like this is really really fucked up.
fu usa...
EU has the capital but does it have the knowledge workers to build out alternatives?
The problem isn't knowledge workers, we have plenty. The problem is that given the choice between being paid $55k for a EU based company and spend half your salary in rent vs making $200k+ working for a US based company most people chose money. Even without relocating, working for a US based company in Europe makes more sense...
Working for Dassault or Rheinmetall on high tech military equipment will net you less than half what you'd get helping Facebook come up with the most effective way to cram as many ads as physically possible in your fellow citizens' lives... it's like we got our priorities backward and reward things than shouldn't even exist
A lot of people work comfortably for EU companies. Yes, there’s more money somewhere else in this world, but when your income is good enough other things matter more. I think you are exaggerating the problem. Europe can certainly handle building the core tech stack to achieve sovereignty.
The internship I had half way through my studies for a US based company (10+ years ago) paid more than most tech jobs you can land in Paris with a masters degree (right now)... I think you're underestimating the problem. Tech workers are seen as an expense, not a resource, and certainly not as assets.
There are plenty of developer jobs in Europe paying 70k+ €. While salaries may be lower than in the US, your real quality of life can be much better because:
1. Lower food costs. Groceries are cheaper and healthier and eating out is more affordable (+ tipping is not necesary)
2. Generally lower rent. Unless you live outside a few very expensive cities (but it would compensate with higher salaries)
3. No need for a car. Public transport usually costs around 40 to 60 € per month.
4. No need to save for college. Public universities are free or very cheap
5. Healthcare is covered. No huge insurance premiums or surprise medical bills.
6. Less working time. Shorter workweeks, fewer unpaid overtime hours, and stronger limits on burnout.
7. More paid vacation. 25 to 30 days off per year is standard plus public holidays
8. Paid parental leave for both parents without risking your job.
9. Stronger worker protections including notice periods and unemployment benefits.
10. Child benefits and subsidized childcare in many countries.
11. Lower overall stress due to less financial anxiety around health and education.
12. Better work life balance and healthier company culture.
13. High quality public services and safer cities.
14. Easy and cheap travel across many countries. ...
I guess I will stop here.
Lower salary does not mean lower standard of living.
But again you can get all of that and double your salary by working for a US company from europe... All my friends are doing that and are paid 120k+ which no local company would ever pay, that's like exec level salary in most regular local companies.
70k really isn't that much, that's 3500/month net in france or germany, you can already remove 1000-1500 for rent alone if you live in a western EU capital
I'm sorry, €70K netto maybe, but that represents usually €140K bruto, which is quite uncommon.
€70K netto in the other hand is not a good salary in Western Europe if you want a decent quality of life.
It means that you will never own more than a studio appartement in your lifetime.
I make less then 70k€ yearly and I live in a capital and sure I'm not wealthy as fuck but it's perfectly fine.
People need to stop this obssession with getting rich, I know it's because our system glorifies it (and greed), but most people won't get rich (value isn't created magically, if one has a lot, a lot have nearly nothing) and being wealthy is immoral in any cases.
> sure I'm not wealthy as fuck but it's perfectly fine.
With that you can't even qualify for a 30 years mortgage to buy a single bedroom flat in most western EU capitals lol
Some people want more from life than be a rentoid until the state allows them to retire at 70 years old
You have no idea what you're talking about. Approx. 6k€ net is way more than enough to live a "decent quality of life" in western Europe, unless you specifically seek out very expensive rent.
I don't think that's true. Have a look at the people who are actually working in the US offices of US companies. There are some Americans but you'll also find plenty of Europeans as well as people from all over the world.
Have a look at where US tech companies offices are. You'll find plenty of them in the EU
It has the knowledge workers but not the capital or laws that make it attractive for them to build tech firms.
Many US tech firms would be either illegal to operate in the EU or legally very difficult. Any social network is a problem to operate in the EU because you are considered fully liable for the speech acts of users regardless of company size.
Now look at web search, YouTube, social media, messaging apps, cloud... they all involve reproducing the speech of users at scale without pre-moderation. So you just can't operate them in Europe without endless legal problems and costs that make you uncompetitive. Even operating something like Hetzner is hard!
So if the EU continues picking fights with the US and access is lost, who in their right mind would sign up for the multi-decade effort to compete with them? It would be an endless nightmare and there's really no point. The EU Commission has absolutely no institutional will or ability to compete with the US in tech or service markets, meaning the EU will absolutely blink first. They are all Outlook and Netflix addicts, all it will take is their wives/husbands/children bitching about how they suddenly can't use the App Store and they'll fold quickly. So anyone dumb enough to try and build up a business that competes with the US firms purely by being EU-homed will get immolated the moment the EU gives up and submits to what the White House wants, which they are 100% guaranteed to do.
The EU can only fine US tech giants because it's good at suffocating its own European companies with some of its members states having one of the highest taxes and subject to the EU's regulations.
It's no wonder AI startups like Mistral (France) are so dependent on US VCs and the same is true with Lovable (Sweden) who were able to grow faster than Europe trying to strangle them.
Since there are rare startup home-runs that are from Europe, the EU instead needs find a way to impose fines on US big tech companies. They (EU) will certainly do the same with the Big AI companies very soon.
You're pretending like the fines target US companies. GDPR fines target malpractice and mishandling of data. The DMC seeks to break up artificial digital market monopolies. These apply to corporations operating in the EU, with no basis on where they operate from. Don't want to get punished for creating an uncompetitive monopoly? Don't create an uncompetitive monopoly.
Remember that the US literally sent members of the CIA to steal a french chip company and it's IP in the late 80's / early 90's.
Does that sound like fair competition?