The EU does not exist as a unit, it's 27 sovereign states cooperating. In the EU the single market is an achievement across countries, but can't compare with single large internal markets.
China as the second economy of the world managed to succeed with a centralised plan.
So I think market size and economic power is a bigger indicator than centralised vs not.
It is. As you said, Meta and Google started with small investments, but now they are multi trillion dollar behemoths. Any company, even with millions of dollars in funding, can’t compete with them because they have tens of thousands of developers and infrastructure worth tens or even hundreds of billions of USD. They have penetrated the entire EU market and have enough money to burn, allowing them to survive any competition that isn’t state funded. The risk for private capital is huge, and the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.
The only alternative would have been the Chinese route, building local equivalents of Google, AWS, Amazon, Meta etc. like they did in China but it seems that ship has already sailed for the EU, given the current state of things.
This isn't true, it's just that all of the EU excess capital gets invested in the US, so it appears true.
Basically it will be outsourcing the traditional government censorship, oppression and propaganda work to the tech private sector because it's 1000x more efficient that the government at this, and it also helps keep the image of those in power clean since if they get caught they can throw big-tech under the bus with some fines. It's literally the perfect setup.
How do I know this? Is it because I'm clairvoyant or have a tinfoil hat on? No, it's because US big-techs like Apple literally did the same deal for the CCP in China, so now that the can of worms has been opened, all the other countries want the same deal with big-tech.
And if you think the EU leadership is somehow morally above these types of practices, boy you couldn't be more wrong. Their unscrupulous use of Israeli Pegasus spy-ware and Palantir surveilance-ware proves they're not, they're cut from the same cloth as the rest. They'll gladly copy the CCP great firewall and give it a coat of blue paint with some gold stars on it and say it's for "protecting your democracy".
There is no such thing as EU leadership, other than the governments of the 27 members. So it's kinda unlikely that the above would happen (certainly possible but I reckon it's pretty low probability).
And yes, EU wide censorship introduced by the EU commission and forced onto EU members is definitely possible if politicians of all 27 members agree on that.
If you think your nations politicians don't have the balls to push for laws that suppress your freedoms just so they can keep their seats you're delulu.
A decade ago I would have expected EU alternatives to be much worse but I'm less sure these days. Most US tech companies have moved past the innovator stage and spend most of their efforts on rent seeking and marketing.
All that said, I don't actually expect the EU to handle this well. They've been fumbling long term threats with regularity, and I don't they'll suddenly start doing better. They'll probably muddle along with most of their US dependencies until a massive disaster hits them in the face.