The EU majorly screwed up by not focusing on a homegrown software ecosystem. The Chinese, due to either luck or competence or both, have a parallel big tech ecosystem compared to America and that is a huge advantage.
However, we are all complicit in this state of affairs, with pushing dreams of a broderless internet. If the EU had tried to limit Facebook or Google access to the EU markets, or just favored some inferior EU alternatives, people on this very forum would have been up in arms about government overreach, balkanization of the Internet, and Brussels bureaucrats trying to stay relevant.
Not really. Meta and Alphabet products like FB, IG, and YouTube remain heavily used in Russia, even in spite of domestic alternatives like VK or Yandex.
That said, pre-2022, Russia definitely had a strong VC and entrepreneurship scene compared to the the rest of Europe. NGINX, Yandex, VK, and Kasperskey were all able to be formed in Russia in the 2000s due to a much less risk averse capital market. Same with Ukraine (eg. Grammarly, Ring) and Belarus (eg. Wargaming)
Aside from Romania and Czechia, I don't see a similar ecosystem anywhere in Europe (even Poland and Ireland's tech industry are largely dominated by FDI from large American players like Google and Bulgaria's from contractor and freelancer shenanigans).
Ofc, unlike France and Germany, Czechia and Romania are way less combative to American tech companies and capital, so it's easier for them to justify investing for the long haul. Romanian successes like UIPath show that the only way a competitive European tech player can develop is through cooperation with the US.
Otherwise, I generally completely agree with you. The EU tech scene is overall either US controlled or anemic. I'd note that Romania hardly has a real local tech scene. While we have a very large number of programmers and programming positions, it's almost entirely either US (and a few EU, Canadian, Israeli) companies' local offices or explicit outsourcing companies. The exceptions are UIPath, BitDefender, and a few companies that work exclusively on government contracts (and are deeply embedded with the political establishment).
If relations with the USA worsened significantly, it's very hard to see how the Romanian programming/tech sector would survive. There is very very little local leadership on the business side.
Unlike Western European countries, Eastern countries like Romania and Poland have helped the US burden share significantly, and this is reflected in bipartisan foreign policy within the US.
Even Elbridge Colby, Oraina Mastro, and Rush Doshi (the primary foreign policy scholars in the US who built bipartisan support for American shifting focus to Asia) have pointed this out.
There's a reason it's overwhelmingly Germany and France that has been vocally combative against the US (be it Trump or Biden due to the IRA+CHIPS).
> The fact that VK and Yandex (and Telegram, I would add) exist at all, and have a clear presence in the public in Russia and several Russian-speaking countries around them, already puts them way ahead of the EU on this front, even if they have not replaced FB, IG, etc like WeChat did in China.
The EU could have been much more FDI friendly like India, which helped enable Meta and Alphabet to devolve even product leadership roles within India. India has been able to get American tech platforms to bend to Indian Internet regulations with little pushback while also dangling massive incentives.
Either build a domestic ecosystem (eg. Russia, China) or become entirely inseparable (eg. India, Israel).
The EU cannot catch up with the former, so it has no choice but to submit and work to become the latter.
> I'd note that Romania hardly has a real local tech scene
No tech scene is 100% local. Barely 5 years ago Microsoft China was the dream R&D job, and Ericcson's R&D remains in China to this day and continues to work on 5G and 6G R&D.
An international ecosystem allows a domestic market to access capital it could not before.
For example, Romania is significantly outperforming Poland in tech despite being being a smaller and poorer country because Romania made sure to leverage the diaspora in the US. Israel, India, and Czechia all did the same.
The issue is Germany and France continue to remain insular and unfriendly to services FDI, and try to make it the entire EU's problem. Romania gets more benefit from an American cloud like AWS domiciled in Cluj compared to a German owned and domiciled "cloud" like Hetzner.
That's the big difference in the EU when you are a start-up and want to go from the $10-50M range to $500M+: in the US and China, you have one big market with a shared language and one rule of law. In Europe? The second you want to expand to a market bigger than 50M people you have to adapt to different languages, cultures and laws.
If you have not baked it in at the start that can be a huge roadblock. And if you have baked it in at the start you may have missed your chance due to the delay you incurred. Then you're just a target to be eaten by a US or Chinese company with a big war chest earned in their own market.
That's why part of the EU rules is about trying to unify its member countries laws. Yes GDPR can seem like a protectionist framework from outside, but the main goal was to make all country in the EU have one shared legal system to handle personal data. So sharing them becomes easier inside the EU. We can expect more of this kind of laws to be written but they'll always be too late.
So do US companies which operate in the EU. I doubt that's the main limiting factor.
Yes, but before operating in the EU those companies benefited from the fact the US market is a 300 million people one to scale up. And that's not factoring in the number of other English speaking countries with similar legal systems and treaties with the US.
Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea.
Unlike in Europe, both Naver and Samsung began investing in building their own domestic cloud capabilities in the early 2010s.
> Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea.
I've seen from the inside the IT infra of several chaebol subsidiaries (of different groups), of Korean big tech, as well as Korean startups, and really only some of the chaebol subsidiaries made use of these local clouds. Near 0% for startups, low single digits for big tech (besides Naver themselves obviously) and even for the big corps I'd estimate <30%. Azure and AWS are plenty popular, as well as of course on-prem still having a much higher market share than in the West. Not sure if most big corps have a random unused database on Naver Cloud to satisfy some government statistic but talking about meaningful usage here.
No worries. I've tended to glaze over the Korean market so I'm glad to get some more granular info
> Azure and AWS are plenty popular
I was under the assumption that Samsung Cloud is largely a white label of AWS (sort of like Open Telekom Cloud in Germany), and much of the AWS spend can be treated as Samsung SDS. Is that correct?
Then there are many more which I can't be bothered looking at their founding dates, like gridscale, Elastx, Open Telecom Cloud, Fuga, Seeway.
That said, my point still stands. All the major examples you mentioned (OVH, Scaleway, gridscale) have largely limited FDI and headcount to within France or Germany, while GCP's Warsaw office owns the product leadership for much of GKE globally, AWS Bucharest owns a major part of AWS's Privacy and Data Security portfolio, MS Praha owns a significant portion of CoreAI, and Ireland is one of MS Azure's major DC hubs.
Most French and German PR about "digital sovereignity" rings hollow when the French and German vendors who stand to benefit have largely kept Capex and headcount within France and Germany.
Why should Poland, Romania, Czechia, Ireland, and Bulgaria lose hundreds of well paying high income tax bracket jobs and billions in FDI and income tax to subsidize French and German industry?
And this is why just about every EU grand strategy conversation falls apart - the individual member states will look out for themselves over the collective. For example, France's recent objection to Germany, the UK, and the Nordics buying American weapons to send to Ukraine instead of buying French [0] and Dassault's lobbying of France to withdraw from FCAS if it doesn't get 80% workshare [1]
German politicians don't answer to Polish voters. Greek politicians don't answer to Irish voters. Either the EU removes national soverignity and becomes a truly federal and centralized union, or the EU has to gradually reduce the political aspects and return to the 1990s and 2000s style defense and economic cooperation union that it was.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/a38f6f36-6284-428c-b8af-fe6d6d7db...
The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone, regardless of european politics and societal characteristics. Bickering about mega-clown jobs and presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that.
Because I want it answered. If you cannot answer that question, then any discussion is moot.
> The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone
We can leave Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, Germany, and Poland and deploy our forces in the Pacific where we face a problem that actually matters.
Then deal with Ukraine on your own. Why even buy American weapons to give to the Ukrainians?
You can't deal with the Chinese - their foreign minister has himself told EU leadership that they need a Russian victory in Ukraine. If you want to replace us with the Chinese, then you need to sacrifice Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe to Russian orbit.
We can also leave the Red Sea, leaving it to you guys to solve the Houthi crisis - it's not our problem.
We can leave Armenia, letting it return to Russian orbit.
We can leave Turkiye, thus removing the only barrier holding Turkiye back from a hot conflict in Cyprus and the Greek Islands.
> presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that
Then present an actual solution. All the "solutions" I see are basically France or Germany trying to increase their own relative position, but then trying to undermine the other.
There is no unified Europe from a strategy perspective.
The US decided the policy of turning the 2022 Ukraine invasion into a slowburn and sacrifice of the ukrainians to the obviously ludicrous expectation that Russia wasn't able to move over to a war economy and make territorial gains. This is right now rupturing the EU, which is a rather explicit US policy aim, and also why US groups are financing and coddling european fascist movements.
Clearly not an ally worth appeasing on these reasons alone. Then there's the genocide in Palestine and promotion of societal collapse in north Africa and large portions of the Middle East. I also expect the US to shield genocidaires in Sudan on the behest of gulf emirs. Today the US is also waging economic war against the EU and NATO states, as well as the UN. It's a rabid, belligerent state that makes the hawks of Moscow, disgusting and terrifying as they are, look comparably sane and reliable.
You're comparing companies of widely varying size.
There's not much sense for these French and German companies to open other European offices at their current size, much like there's not much sense for their eastern European equivalents to open offices in France or Germany.
For that matter, it didn't make much sense for Microsoft to open shops in Europe in the 80's, or for Google in the 2000's
On the other hand, it is pretty commonplace for European companies with enough activity across Europe to have offices around and to quite freely move/open offices in other countries. So I don't really see this point as a good one.
OVHCloud is not AWS size, but it is still a large company that generates over $1B in revenue. Yet is has almost no dev or product leadership presence outside of France or the US. Same with Scaleway, which is a division of Iliad SA - one of the largest telcos in France and founded by one of Macron's largest backers who is also the son-in-law of Bernard Arnault of LVMH (and the reason why every country negotiating with the EU puts tariffs on Congac and Champagne), who has pushed Macron to dump ministers and even his PM.
> it is pretty commonplace for European companies with enough activity across Europe to have offices around and to quite freely move/open offices in other countries.
Both OVHCloud and Scaleway have been around since 1999, yet haven't ever expanded their core engineering or product responsibilities outside France or the US.
Meanwhile, AWS, GCP, Microsoft, and hundreds of American tech companies and startups have all given core product leadership responsibilities to their offices across Central and Eastern Europe.
Even small (compared to OVHCloud) American startups like (randomly picking 2 ik of) Cyberhaven and Snyk have opened offices in Romania and Poland that own product and engineering decisions plus roadmap.
> So I don't really see this point as a good one.
It is a major point because it is French (and German) businesses that are lobbying for a combative position at the expense of other EU member states.
Why should Ireland, Czechia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria suffer a severe capital outflow and retaliation from the US to help French companies that have keep jobs (and thus income and corporate tax revenue) within France and overwhelmingly benefit French (and German) capital owners?
And like I said before, this is why no unified European grand strategy ever develops - inevitably individual European nations undercut each other to protect their domestic industries.
At least Czechia, Poland, and Romania have helped burden-share via their contributions to Ukraine, which outshine those France has provided on a per capita basis, despite being much poorer countries than France.
Because their business hasn't significantly expanded outside of France, much like e.g. Hetzner hasn't significantly moved out of Germany? You should look at the gorilla in the room here.
> Cyberhaven
A company founded by Romanians and Ukrainians. Not surprising they have offices there. You should wonder why they became an american tech company.
On a more general note, this "What has Europe ever done for us/the US are our best friends" stance may be good as a bargaining stance when discussing among EU nations, but people have started believing it, and it's the bane of any serious discussion.
China banned foreign tech to allow for local tech to grow. The EU has tried to be in good relationship with the USA allowing big tech to dominate the old continent.
I think that the arrangement worked well for both the USA and EU for a long time. But now that big tech is highly politically motivated to support the far-right that win-win situation has ended.
The only way for the EU to grow domestic tech is to do what the Chinese did, ban USA tech and let local companies to thrive. I just hope that it is done in an open standard-base way instead of the big tech monopolies of the USA.