Is it somehow related to the Quaero search engine project that burnt 400 million € of taxpayer money in the early 2000s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeisc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://www.heise.de/news/400-Millionen-Euro-fuer-europaeisc...
There are 2 clear things that is so common in Europe:
Politics injecting a shit load of public money thinking that if you give the money you will be able to reproduce American company success and co.
In the end, the money is wasted for their own interest by big groups, intermediaries, and opportunists. When the thing fails, it is the fault of no one, it was just "too hard" and "maybe the money budget was not enough for such a subject"
This is totally different to what leads innovation like Google, where you have doers that create something first and when they are able to show or convince that they have breakthrough, money will flow in by itself.
And at the beginning cash is used for brain and development instead of giving big salaries to top management and political friends.
The second thing that is usual is the pattern with this kind of projects:
- corporate sucks all the money
- responsibility is shared between multiple actors to spread the blame in case of problem.
- project fail and corporate give up. "Not their fault"
- one year later the initial hype subject is back on the table (European search engine sovereignty for ex) and politics announce that they will spend that much more money to resolve it
- same corporate vampires starts again from zero...
- and it fails the same in a loop
Because that's the desired feature, not a bug. The system works just as intended. None of the people at the helm actually believe they can create competitors to US giants, the scope is to funnel public tax money into the right politically connected private industry pockets.
It's just wealth redistribution with a veneer of "sovereignty", similar to large infrastructure projects, except a lot more profitable since more people understand physical infrastructure so it can more easily be scrutinized for corruption, but almost nobody understands IT infrastructure, so it can easily gamed as a bottomless pit for your tax euros that constantly fails in a loop while you socialize the losses and privatize the winnings.
The fervent wish to only let deserving people get grants results in a huge amount of box-ticking and self-promotion that (in my experience) seems to select for self-promotion parasites rather than people who want to make useful products and get rich from customers rather than government funds.
The problem with public funding is not the what but the to whom?
It works fine if you put the right person in charge.
However, there are very few signals to prevent the wrong person being put in charge, as it removes most considerations / incentivizes private industry uses. Which themselves are already tenuous!
EU needs something akin to Stripe Atlas, but that is not what the politicians want because they want EU to be manufacturing industry only, you can always import tech from other places … <shaking head emoji here>
It literally can't work at all. When was the last time you went and bought an Airbus? Airbus doesn't make consumer products. Passengers are the consumers flying inside them but they're not the ones buying them, it's the airlines who only have a monopoly of 2 global players to choose from in a highly regulated industry with expensive moats to enter meaning Airbus and Boeing don't really need to compete cut-throat.
Governments excel at building large infrastructure and defense companies like Airbus, Boeing, what have you, not at building consumer products at scale like Google, Apple, etc sine their success is dictated by the consumer spending preferences, not by requirements a government makes up.
Communist regimes did not make the best consumer products, the free market did.
What an insane comparison.