It was tried:

For example, before Facebook, in Germany there existed studiVZ, schülerVZ, meinVZ (basically the same social network of the same company for different audiences). But this social network wasn't a commercial success, even though for some time it was much more popular in Germany than Facebook.

Generally, many successful German software companies were simply bought by US-American companies:

- SuSE was bought by Novell

- DLD (company: Delix; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Linux-Distribution ) was bought by Red Hat

- Star Division (the company behind Star Office) was bought by Sun (which again was bought by Oracle)

- In 2023, Software AG was bought by the private equity company Silver Lake

- Recently, Hornetsecurity was bought by Proofpoint.