The dominance of the big tech companies is a mistake, a failure in market regulation - they are allowed to go too far in terms of company mergers and anti-competitive behavior.
Of course, Europe can't "compete" in exactly that without loosening the shackles in the same way, but that's not something I, for one, would want.
Failure of market regulation, indeed. Look at big tech. Microsoft got big with dirty tactics. Facebook and Google get away with scandal after scandal. You can't compete with crooks. Not in US, nor in EU, nor in world.
It only looks like failure of market regulation in retrospect for companies like Facebook and Google (Microsoft is a bit different) because these companies grew businesses that simply hadn't existed before.
How do you regulate Google buying something like youtube when youtube was a loss maker at the time, they grew it into a titan. Same with android, smartphones in the form of the iphone were brand new, who was to say at the time that Google would win with all the other companies building smartphones at that time.
Facebook won already in like 2012 or something. What was before that - MySpace? - it just sucked compared to Facebook. Terrible UI. Completely useless, siloed without the "real name" policy.
Facebook was a genuine innovation, both in terms of UI, and in terms of marketing (targeting elite schools first was genius, but hardly non-competitive, anyone could have done it).
I feel like you are fundamentally misunderstanding their entire business model here. The fact that they happened to have popular products is somewhat secondary.
They both got to the size that they got by data mining PII and selling it to the highest bidder in various forms.
Every product requires that people want it. Genuine is a definition up for debate.
Yes, they were better than the competition. Especially Google Search (I remember Altavista et al). However the major innovation is that the user is is the product. (sidenote: ever had to contact Google customer support while being the product?)
If Zuckerberg started Facebook on Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TUE) today he would need to abide by GDPR. Means he can't just start a student DB without consent.
>If Zuckerberg started Facebook on Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TUE) today he would need to abide by GDPR. Means he can't just start a student DB without consent.
What you really mean is that Zuckerberg would not have started Facebook if he would've been in Europe today. Would the world have been better off? Facebook does seem to offer quite a lot of value to millions of people.
The two of us are unable to reach consensus on genuine offering value versus the importance of business ethics. I believe we can better cease this discussion.
They created monopolies by buying up potential competitors. They are case studies in the success of M&A. American regulators and politicians turned a blind eye (and continue to beyond lip service) because of their international dominance.
Facebook brought on transformation in information distribution and social discourse propagation that previously went mostly over top-down media channels.
I think it turned to be a net negative, but it was a seminal change.
There is plenty of tech innovation which heralds from Europe but comes to fruition after moving to the USA. It is not a lack of ideas or one of entrepreneurial spirit but more one of a lack of VC capital and a more stringent legal framework which keeps Europe from producing "the next Google".
I wonder if it's the appetite for tech investment that causes this.
In Australia (outside of a small enclave in Sydney) the only thing that investors know about and want to invest in is Mining (or occasionally Agriculture).
I can see the same situation in Germany: investors want to invest in what they know, and very few of them know about tech products. There's little pockets of tech-savvy investors around Europe, but on the whole there's not that many.
But California has an abundance of investors who know tech and are willing to invest in it. So it's easy to see why a Euro tech company that wants funding would migrate there.
>But California has an abundance of investors who know tech and are willing to invest in it.
Yes i think that's it, i can make a bet that more Windows Servers run in Europe than in the US, Europe is in that field (the mindset) at least 6 years behind the US and China, but some exceptions exists like Estonia.
Of course, Europe can't "compete" in exactly that without loosening the shackles in the same way, but that's not something I, for one, would want.