Bizarre assertion that Europe doesn't have an internet industry. There's this mobile phone company you may have heard of called "Nokia".
Also, I wouldn't call nokia as part of the "internet industry".
Compared to the US and China, europe has performed rather poorly. Europe has hundreds of millions of more people than the US and yet lags far behind the US.
Where is europe's facebook, google, microsoft, amazon, netflix, etc? At least china has their baidu, alibaba, tencent, etc.
The most prominent tech company in europe is SAP and they are more of a software/database/etc company than an internet company.
Europe has to get its act together and get in the game.
2) Spotify, Soundcloud, Skype, Shazam, Deliveroo, King, Rovio etc. And there are hundreds of second tier internet sites looking at this list from 2013:
Skype was sold off to two different US technology giants.
ARM was swallowed up by Japan.
King was eaten by a US company. As was Mojang.
These are all smaller success stories however. They're equivalent to fourth tier US successes, far below the second tier US companies like Adobe, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Airbnb, Priceline.com, Uber, etc.
The parent comment was correct. Europe nearly entirely missed the Internet/Web software business, the mobile software business, the cloud business, and now they're being left far behind in artificial intelligence (save for a few bright spots, such as in Britain, none of which has yielded commercial outcomes of large consequence).
Germany is almost single handedly keeping Europe competitive in the robotics field. And the largest tech company in Europe for the last decade, has been SAP.
Look at this list and compare it to companies like King and Soundcloud:
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Adobe, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Oracle, Activision Blizzard, Salesforce, Priceline, nVidia, Dell, IBM, VMWare, Texas Instruments, Micron, Analog Devices, Applied Materials, HP Inc, HP Enterprise, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, eBay, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Workday, Western Digital, Electronic Arts, Palantir, AMD, Autodesk, Lam Research, ServiceNow, WeWork, Lyft, Dropbox, Splunk, Marvell Technology, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Microchip Technology Inc, NetApp, Juniper, Seagate, Symantec, VeriSign, Slack, Grubhub
And that's ignoring dozens of other companies in the US tech sector with market caps between $2 billion and $20 billion.
"Nokia smartphones were #3 in the UK for the quarter and in the Top 5 in Russia, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern markets"
Seriously, i know - free trade horray- and all that. But our politicians see WeeChat rise and shine- while all we got for opening our markets are outstanding taxes. (Not).