- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
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What Europeans could not build quickly for themselves, due to a thicket of regulations, they often imported just as quickly from abroad….
Skype was a very successful European company that was acquired by Microsoft (and then shut down to promote MS Teams, a product that is much worse). Mojang Studios, famous for its online game Minecraft, is a Swedish product also acquired by Microsoft. DeepMind was acquired by Alphabet/Google from its UK founders.
The list of European companies that have eventually been acquired by U.S. big tech is very long. What Europe lacks in my humble opinion is a sense of sovereignty, meaning we need to make sure that our stakes are protected and not just sold out abroad. We needs more laws to protect this sovereignty (similar to those in the U.S. and China).
I also agree with other views here like @masterspace@lemmy.ca’s remark that American firms are underregulated, but this is something Europe can hardly influence. But Europe should enhance regulation to make sure that technology developed on the continent isn’t given away.
I strongly disagree with the article in that sense. There is a lot of homegrown EU tech, Mastodon being another example.
The problem is that scale and size have a quantity all their own. Those European companies sold out to American ones because the American were allowed to grow so big that they had the resource to make the EU companies offers they couldn’t refuse.
Yes but clearly Mastodon is not as popular as Blusky. There are countless other examples one could mention where the US competitor gets much bigger than the European one. Usually the European tech that becomes popular is after they get bought by a US company
This is horseshit.
EU companies have trouble competing with American firms because American firms are under regulated.
America lets its companies monopolize markets and grow too big and then suddenly they become behemoths that are impossible to compete with. The alternatives to Microsoft office are not clunky because they can’t be coded well, they’re clunky because they have to deal with Microsoft’s intentional efforts to avoid fair competition for office software, exact same as with Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon etc.
These are companies that gained market dominance in the US because the US does absolutely Jack Shit to ensure that markets exist with this thing called competition (i.e. 3+ competitors). These giant firms then use the resources extracted from their dominant position to rapidly expand globally and stifle competition before it exists.
America writers are often insanely blind to the fact that what they view as “inevitable technological progress”, is actually choices made by corporations and legislatures about how things should be done. Not everything needs to move at the fastest possible pace and grow to cancerous proportions, but this writer treats that as an inevitability… Ironically while writing about a region where it has been proven to not be an inevitability.
Fully agree, regulation is needed. We can exclude small companies from some of them so getting started is easy.
Similarly to what you comment on, I read studies which looked at what would need to happen for Europe to create companies of that size. They study what is holding companies back. Some of what they find may be right such as the lack of available risk capital, the availability of a unified market, and the easy connection to other companies. Yet the whole premise feels wrong. We don’t need that size of corporations. We need many smaller companies standing together as a whole.
We need a shared basis for a free market.
For those who forgot: a free market is one where many can compete on the same basis. It is not a market without rules, it is one requiring rules for a level playing field.
Yeah, pretty much every problem we are facing from climate change, to the wealth inequality are caused by the ability of corporations to consolidate and acquire power
Correction: the European courts try to restrict bad homegrown tech.
It is better if that tech is owned for and by the people, not shareholders and greedy CEOs. If the tech satisfies that requirement and isn’t energy-slurping, privacy-infringing, then by all means!
