Okay, so why is the EU seemingly able to regulate big tech? It's a capitalist continent.
It's literal misinformation to say that the EU is more protectionist than the US. It was a Trump talking point, and never based in fact.
EU: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/tariff-rate-appl...
US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/tariff-rate-appli...
The EU precovid had a net positive trade balance with the rest of the world. [1].
The US precovid had a net negative trade balance of nearly $50 Bn a month. [2].
The balance of trade between the US and EU is quite remarkably in the favor of the EU for trade with a "protectionist state ". How do you explain this discrepancy? If the US is so protectionist why are exports as a percentage of its GDP 1.58 times smaller than that of the EU [3][4]?
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d... [2]: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/us-international-trade-goods-a... [3]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B020RE1Q156NBEA
It's unsupportable nonsense to claim otherwise.
There are plenty of other subsidies and policy making ways to be protectionist.
And if it really were such nonsense to suggest other wise, why can you not explain the discrepancy of the US - EU trade balance. It should be simple.
If you honestly believe otherwise, you are intentionally misinformed.
We hosted a German foreign exchange student.
He was very aware of famous Youtubers, utilize Google for searches, watched Tiktok constantly. He owned the latest iPhone. His English was amazing.
In certain respects, I wasn't sure if we ever offered him a radically different experience than when he experienced living in Hannover.
Big (U.S.) Tech was very embedded in his life.
nice choice of words
They have a monopoly on iphones.
> Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
> look at Airbus, InBev or LVMH.
I did. Google's EU division had more revenue than any of those companies worldwide. It seems like Google's EU division (which is an EU company owned entirely by Google) is a bigger EU company than any of those three.
Easy enough question to answer by looking at the beneficial owners of a company's stock. I'd wager every "US company" as commonly understood is, in addition to being listed on US stock exchanges, headquartered in the US, and having significant operations in the US, is also majority-owned by American citizens.
Specifically, I don't know about AirBus and LVMH, but InBev seems to be primarily owned by American based mutual funds.
As a consequence, the EU has a lot of experience in pushing against powerful interests. It's doing that all the time, and it's also moderately successful at that. While many attempts at regulating giant businesses or forcing member states to do something they don't want ultimately fail, sometimes the EU manages to get things done.
The US is more of a "corporatocracy" than a real democracy these days.
Congress is even incapable of impeaching a president that tried to overturn an election by force. That's a pretty embarassing state of affairs for American democracy.
How exactly does that logic work?
There is a baseline set of rules (in the USA we have the Constitution) for how the game works. Like a person's freedom to swing their arm, a voter's freedom on what to vote for must stop at the limit of the other voters' rights. The "Tyranny of the Majority" is a related concept as well.
It's just that phrasing seems hilariously and ironically out of wack.
It's as if some people think they know better then unwashed masses so they should be in charge regardless of sentiment. Ok, fine, maybe they do, but that isn't called "democracy".
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-un-rights/greece-block...
1. Many parts of Europe still have a strong labor movement. This is the only effective counterbalance to corporate power in politics. The US has what may be the lowest rate of union coverage in the OECD (~10%) and most of that is police and teacher unions;
2. Europe by and large is not hypercapitalist like the US is. The normal is social democracy, which is still fundamentally capitalist but way less extreme;
3. Religion. Different European countries have more or less mostly Christian influence but that influence is way less militant. White evangelicalism and its effect ofn politics is more akin to wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. It's also hyper-capitalist;
4. The election process itself in European countries isn't generally political. US states often have the Secretary of State in charge of elections and that's a political office. Redistricting is inherently political. Other countries don't do this. Electoral boundaries are more often drawn by an independent organization;
5. Europe doesn't suffer from the "money = speech" falsehood; and
6. Europe still has the recent memory of two World Wars and the HOlocaust that favors cooperation over division.
#3 doesn't pass the sniff test to me: Europe has it's Christian Wahhabists, too. Hungary and Poland broke the backs of their democracies even faster than the US is, in the name of banning gay people, and they've cooperated to break the EU sanctions mechanism that was supposed to keep them from doing this.
Also #5 is wrong - or, at least, not properly root-caused. "Money-equals-speech" is itself a result of free-speech extremism. If we say the government can't regulate speech, then a way around that is to regulate money spent to speak. Let's say Ron DeSantis wants to ban gay advocacy - but the 1st Amendment says "hell no". Instead he gets a bill passed that bans spending money to purchase pride flags, buying paper to print books with gay characters in them, buying billboards with pro-LGBT messaging, or TV ad spots with the same. It's very difficult to not read this as a speech-restricting bill.
The argument in Citizens' United - the money-equals-speech case - was that even a content-neutral funding cap was an infringement of free speech. The government can't mandate that all politicians whisper, after all. Except now we have a fundraising war because every politician needs to shout as loudly as possible. And to do that you need lots of money. The US Supreme Court didn't invent "money-equals-speech", it's just a fact of how political speech works.
Europe does not have this problem because Europe is willing to entertain restrictions on political speech that the US considers unconscionable. Several EU member states have constitutional bans on fascism and hate speech[0], for example. You could never get away with that in the US for any reason. Freedom of speech is not entirely unprotected in the EU, of course - the protections are just more reasoned and considered than the blunt instrument of "Congress shall make no law".
I'm not sure about #6 either. Did America not get involved in WWII? I mean, we did try to cover up the Holocaust[1] early on and we got involved later than Europe, but it's just as culturally engrained here as it presumably is over there.
[0] Which, BTW, should be considered as censorious in and of themselves. Any political ideology which calls for the killing of specific groups of people is engaging in censorship.
[1] Specifically: FDR knew about it early on; and the New York Times buried it many pages deep because they were shy about being a "Jewish newspaper".
Protectionism (big tech is USA born)?
Elites are old money not new?
No tax income (probably this)?
This is the big one right here. Europe has pretty much missed the boat on tech so its elites are from older industries that tech is starting to compete with. You can see this same dynamic here in the US as the legacy media has declared war on the tech industry for threatening its power.
Notice how China has no trouble regulating US tech either?