It will probably happen at some point. In 1990, the EU was easy to do business in and represented 25% of world GDP. Now it’s exceeding difficult to do business in and represents just 14% of world GDP. If those two trends continue, there will be a point where it’s just not worth it for large companies to be threatened with fines on their “global turnover”.
> You know that EU also have computers engineers ? It’s not like we couldn’t survive without Apple or Google.
You vastly underestimate how interconnected and dependent the modern tech stack is.
EU computer engineers would be thrown back to 1950s if they could not depend on decades of US engineering and services.
I say that as a European.
EU is clearly playing a losing game here and is well on track of becoming the world's largest outdoor museum.
Apple and Google are not "decades of US engineering". They are two corporations that really exploit decades of (open source) US (and European) engineering to siphon huge profits to tax havens. If they were to exit the EU market, Europeans would still have access to US engineering just fine.
Yeah, I think that’s the likely direction, similar to the path China took in the aughts. There will probably eventually be some reasonably large EU-based social networks and maybe even operating systems.
I don’t think that will save you from monopolies, though. Network effects are strong.
... Eh? The EU is far easier to do business in today than in 1990; in 1990 you had to care about local regulations to a far larger extent, and they were far weirder and often more protectionist/anticompetitive. In a number of countries in 1990 Apple wouldn't have been able to sell phones, say, had they been in that business at the time; consumer phone equipment was a state monopoly. Very few foreign (or European) countries actually did business in all Western European countries in 1990; it was too much overhead.
If "easy to do business in" and having a large percentage of global GDP requires the ability for tech companies to exploit their users, then I for one am glad as a EU citizen to give up on those to be able to have tech companies curtailed like this, and I wish for the EC to make business even more difficult here.
Nothing is stopping companies from acting in a way that isn't anti-customer, other than the fact that anti-customer behaviour is more profitable than acting properly in the single market. We're finally seeing these externalities be addressed and be made slightly better, even if there's still so much more that could be done.
There is literally no chance of Apple exiting Europe. Don't be silly. Next largest consumer market would be China. Good luck finding economic freedom there.
