Those companies are bigger than states, have high influence on politics and together could overthrow states. If you have a innovative idea without an entire law department they will just copy it or pressure you into a buy out. If you play by the law you cannot beat them at their game if they don't let you.
Eu produces effectively 0 innovative tech because the PR marketing-machine that is geared to sell you stocks on the US stock market makes incessant noise about American companies to sell those shares to you while excluding anyone outside.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/meet-europe-top-tech-...
Those are the 'hot up and coming'.
https://www.value.today/top-companies/top-technology-compani...
Those are by size.
All of this, without talking about SAP and the like.
European businesses dont operate on 'Sell over-inflated shares to those suckers to "capitalize"' - they operate on traditional indicators. Hence there isnt a need in Europe to constantly hawk any company's shares to make fools part with their money for the sake of financial sector. So you end up with companies like Hetzner slowly growing from engineering roots and then suddenly jumping on to the other side of the ocean to kick incumbent cloud butt there.
Because its almost impossible to compete? These companies have so many resources, its impossible for any local competitor to compete. Amazon can just crash the prices till the competition dies, Google can just not allow YouTube on it, Facebook will exist because of the network it has.
What the EU is doing is what is needed to happen long ago. These companies are not currently successful because they offer the best experience or the best innovativtion, they are successful because they crush anyone else.
For example WhatsApp has many many better alternatives, which have better features and better privacy, but it still the #1 because of the monopoly it has on communication.
What the EU did here is smart, they didn't outright ban WhatsApp, or funded a direct competitor. They forced them to play fair, to stop the monopolistic behavior and force them to compete on features, rather than succeeding only because my familly is on WhatsApp.
The same thing applies to Apple, which forces to everyone to use its crappy, intentionally handicapped browser engine.
And also forcing everyone to use its payment services while taking percentage of the profits and not even allowing you to increase the prices to cover their percentage!, this is absolutely outreagous and finally something is being done about it.
Explain the number of American unicorns and the (almost) complete lack of European unicorns then? Somehow American companies and startups find ways to compete and be relevant, and it just does not happen in Europe.
If you could snap your fingers and force Apple and Google to implement this today, these new markets (app stores and browsers for iOS) would be 99% filled by American companies.
Leading to EXTREME bloat in the stock market in 'valuations' that go over, what, 700 times the actual near-term revenue of corporations? Based on 'future revenue' that is supposed to materialize, but not visible into the next decade?
Ending up in the investment space being able to dump insane amounts of money on hundreds of startups at a time by calculating that even if 99 of them fail at any given time, just one of them turning into an over-valued 'unicorn' would end up flushing the investor with 'value'?
Which came down crashing the moment a few countries started trading oil and other resources with non-dollar currencies? So much that now all those unicorns all the way to Twitter and Facebook are in hot water because of their overvalued shares compared to their actual profits?
...
Give any country free, non-devaluing money, and anyone will be able to do anything.
Excusing business, excusing governments; an international pastime of the Europeans, apparently.
Europeans did in fact exist before all of the listed examples came into being, and so could have outcompeted any of them even if they are now dominant. But I still think Europeans _could_ compete, even if culturally they are not prepared to be competitive. Amazon is only a fraction of retail sales and has huge weaknesses; Europeans who know their markets better could compete if they wanted to (especially with the huge amount of protectionism national governments are willing to engage in). LINE exists in Japan, presumably a smaller market than Europe that has managed to produce a viable WhatsApp competitor. Facebook was unstoppable until TikTok ate their lunch.
Again, I’m astounded by the European affinity for excusing uncompetitive businesses.
This is not realistic.
When amazon noticed diapers.com, they were basically forced to sell out. because amazon was already selling diapers at a loss and was ready to drive the price "down to zero".
No body can compete with that.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...
Before Amazon was ascendant, I think it was Walmart that was the dominant player making sure a small company like Amazon could never grow to become competitive.
I don’t understand the European culture of making excuses for uncompetitive business when time after time the Americans, and increasingly the Chinese, show that it is actually possible to innovate and disrupt entrenched competitors.
Any country can 'compete' if they allow their society to be ravaged by such sociopathy. Until they face social collapse. Like the US is doing now.
Gun violence is a huge drag on the American economy, so it doesn’t make sense to say “Americans are competitive because corporations can profit off guns”. Americans are competitive _despite_ massive regulatory failures and IMO could be quite a lot more competitive if we paired entrepreneurial ambition with basic government competence.
By the way, “pink goo” (more commonly pink slime) is not dangerous, and is used to cut down on waste. It is the “ugly produce” of the meat world. I don’t see anything objectionable about pink slime that isn’t also objectionable about meat in general as a food.
And they are competitive. They have a big tech space rendering every single product and service that US tech renders. Except, there is no such obligation in Europe to constantly hawk stocks to increase stock prices. From cloud providers to social networks, all kinds of things are in Europe. In China. In Japan. Americans dont hear about them.
> Pink goo
It was an example. Those corporations have no obligation to tell you what exactly they put in the 'food'.
Signal is not a $75B company so it doesn't have to interop with Whatsapp (nor do I think this makes any sense, as the encryption story is different across apps)
Also no body uses SMS outside the US, and the rule requires to keep encryption, yes its probably not going to be E2EE, unless the app is translating the message to another protocol locally. But its still better than SMS.
No, it’s because users don’t feel the need to switch. I have uninstalled WhatsApp 4 years ago, same time when I deleted my Facebook account. Haven’t had a single regret. When people ask me to contact them via WhatsApp, I tell them I don’t use it. Anyone can do that.
Agree about the EU though.
Yours is a throughly debunked argument.