The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really).
Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
Sure, you might not have all the media on one big convenient pile like on Youtube, but that is kinda the point (with no single pile owner there is no single entity that decideds what goes on the pile or not).
That's why Europe needs that push to get their act together and start being self-sufficient, digital services-wise.
Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy.
The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.
The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences.
https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in...
Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked.
There are clear biases in its content provision, such as its coverage of certain rich people and establishment bodies.
8 out of the 10 largest Wikipedias are European languages...
Interestingly, the only people having a wider selection are the ones outside of EU/US/China as they'll be free to pick up whatever they want.
The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...
You’re correct that few EU companies get as large as US monopolies, but that’s kind of the goal when you want a functioning market.
So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.
I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.
starting at 20%, increasing 1% each month until the "liberation day" tariffs are dropped
the innovation fund should be structured build up local competitors to US hyperscalers
Its practical to use GCP, Azure and AWS for sure but yeah they were always market dominant.
Its probably time to say good buy to an old ally who became demented and hostile to europe :(
The US exports far more digital services to the EU, though.
Understanding those things, it would seem a particularly unwise framing for the US government to focus on EU digital services exports.
LLMs are rapidly commoditizing software, and in particular making it far easier to handle the regulatory compliance and regional fragmentation that have traditionally held back software companies in the EU. Combine that with growing concerns about software trust, and the EU looks like an increasingly attractive bet for future software investment.
Ironic, then, that Europe seems slowest to adopt the very tool that could finally solve its fragmentation problem.
Two governments, two very different strategies to cripple themselves. The race is on.
We hired someone that could sell in Italian, French, and Spanish. Her profile is fairly rare, given she had a good understanding of the customer. I can't believe our CEO let her go simply because of a 4-days at the office obsession…
LLMs can't really fix this. Even though she could speak Spanish, the culture and customer needs for Spain will be a little different than those for Italy. Traditions will be different. She's a wonderful human being, but imagine a customer in France not liking her “Belgian accent” and tanking a sale… She was really losing motivation because of that. The 2 other people on sales struggled more or less with the same issue.
All hail LLMs, if you want, but Europe's issues are not that easily fixed. We end up obsessing about the wrong stuff, as if compliance and regulation was the Big Problem, instead of a boogeyman that neoliberals love to hate.
Globalisation has made America the richest country on the planet. The real problem is that the money doesn't reach the "deplorable" population.
But that is an INTERNAL issue that could have easily be solved with voting for Bernie Sanders.
People vote against their own interests is a tale as old as democracy itself.
As for cloning the US software industry with LLMs ... with which non-US LLMs, exactly? Mistral? The best LLMs for coding (which still can't handle many important tasks) are: Gemini, Claude, GPT. All non-EU models.
We should have learned that the USA can't be trusted when Nixon ended bretton woods so it didn't have to give France it's gold back.
“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”
Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.
You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
They did so quite a few times, and then they let the home-grown alternatives be bought out by US capital.
Now the same EU countries are waking up and realizing that having pieces of your digital infrastructure in someone else's hands was bad bet but unfortunately, it will take decades to build the same thing in the EU.
But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
> The European Union and certain EU Member States have persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines, and directives against U.S. service providers.
Persisted in a continuing course, saying the same thing twice.
> In stark contrast, EU service providers have been able to operate freely in the United States for decades, benefitting from access to our market and consumers on a level playing field.
"Benefiting" is spelled with one t.
> If the EU and EU Member States insist on continuing to restrict, limit, and deter the competitiveness of U.S. service providers through discriminatory means...
Again, restricting and limiting mean the same thing. Also, can you deter competitiveness?
Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!
I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.
Give me an example where Antitrust was actually breaking any monopoly.
In the EU and the Microsoft antitrust case, the remedy was to give the best poison to the competitors (free software Samba in that case) in that case royalties over patents.
Antitrust don't work, fines are too low, remedies are not working, and the administration is biased and politicized.
It really isn't representative of the real world average human intelligence and capacity to debate or even discuss ideas.
The EU is just itching for any opportunity to get rid of US tech firms because they’re increasingly seen as sovereignty risks. And while the GDPR fines (that this likely refers to) appear huge on absolute terms, they are still low enough that US firms voluntarily decide to violate those laws and just pay the fines.
The US sees TikTok as a risk. For the EU, it’s Microsoft Office.
I think the American government is mad at the DMA more than anything. Breaking up the monopolies that are currently firmly held by American tech giants goes directly against the interests of the White House, especially now that they're able to openly bribe the president.
It's the not the government, it's the large american companies behind it.
That is not even remotely close to the truth. The EU is not itching to get rid of Microsoft nor Windows nor Google. If these companies left tomorrow, the EU will have enormous problems replacing them if that is even possible in the first place.
The EU countries should have had a homegrown version of each US service up and running and on par with their US counterparts a decade ago, then the EU would have had leverage but as it stands, they have none.
Unless you think that every governmental office will switch to Ubuntu tomorrow morning, in which case I have a bridge to sell you.
Not to mention that the entire EU's messaging needs are met via US companies. Let's see how long the EU can last without WhatsApp, IMessage and Facebook Messenger.
My guess is not long unless you want to use Telegram which was most likely backdoor-ed by the French government not long ago.
This is the problem with the EU as it stands, there is really no mea-culpa from the institutions for their inaction and getting caught with their pants down.
All of this was foreseeable and could have been avoided, yet here we are.
I don't think those kinds of details matter to a government looking to start yet another trade war, though. The list is based on the question "what legally European tech companies do business in America, sorted by income".
But yes, legally speaking, FAANG is also EU, same way Volkswagen is an American company. That's not really how people tend to talk about these companies, though.
Ignoring that if the service is free, YOU are the product, is childlike
Otherwise, how can words like "discrimination" even be appropriate?
I really don't mind sitting on a table and discussing things but having the biggest military power on the planet becoming suddenly hostile and pushy like this is really really fucked up.
fu usa...
Working for Dassault or Rheinmetall on high tech military equipment will net you less than half what you'd get helping Facebook come up with the most effective way to cram as many ads as physically possible in your fellow citizens' lives... it's like we got our priorities backward and reward things than shouldn't even exist
1. Lower food costs. Groceries are cheaper and healthier and eating out is more affordable (+ tipping is not necesary)
2. Generally lower rent. Unless you live outside a few very expensive cities (but it would compensate with higher salaries)
3. No need for a car. Public transport usually costs around 40 to 60 € per month.
4. No need to save for college. Public universities are free or very cheap
5. Healthcare is covered. No huge insurance premiums or surprise medical bills.
6. Less working time. Shorter workweeks, fewer unpaid overtime hours, and stronger limits on burnout.
7. More paid vacation. 25 to 30 days off per year is standard plus public holidays
8. Paid parental leave for both parents without risking your job.
9. Stronger worker protections including notice periods and unemployment benefits.
10. Child benefits and subsidized childcare in many countries.
11. Lower overall stress due to less financial anxiety around health and education.
12. Better work life balance and healthier company culture.
13. High quality public services and safer cities.
14. Easy and cheap travel across many countries. ...
I guess I will stop here.
Lower salary does not mean lower standard of living.
€70K netto in the other hand is not a good salary in Western Europe if you want a decent quality of life.
It means that you will never own more than a studio appartement in your lifetime.
Have a look at where US tech companies offices are. You'll find plenty of them in the EU
Many US tech firms would be either illegal to operate in the EU or legally very difficult. Any social network is a problem to operate in the EU because you are considered fully liable for the speech acts of users regardless of company size.
Now look at web search, YouTube, social media, messaging apps, cloud... they all involve reproducing the speech of users at scale without pre-moderation. So you just can't operate them in Europe without endless legal problems and costs that make you uncompetitive. Even operating something like Hetzner is hard!
So if the EU continues picking fights with the US and access is lost, who in their right mind would sign up for the multi-decade effort to compete with them? It would be an endless nightmare and there's really no point. The EU Commission has absolutely no institutional will or ability to compete with the US in tech or service markets, meaning the EU will absolutely blink first. They are all Outlook and Netflix addicts, all it will take is their wives/husbands/children bitching about how they suddenly can't use the App Store and they'll fold quickly. So anyone dumb enough to try and build up a business that competes with the US firms purely by being EU-homed will get immolated the moment the EU gives up and submits to what the White House wants, which they are 100% guaranteed to do.
It's no wonder AI startups like Mistral (France) are so dependent on US VCs and the same is true with Lovable (Sweden) who were able to grow faster than Europe trying to strangle them.
Since there are rare startup home-runs that are from Europe, the EU instead needs find a way to impose fines on US big tech companies. They (EU) will certainly do the same with the Big AI companies very soon.
Does that sound like fair competition?