> building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.
The EU does not have the motivation, mostly. They are not rivals of the US in the way China is. So money goes elsewhere. Europe is still a continent with a whole bunch of people and quite a lot of money. The path of least resistance is to just use American solutions in some areas and to develop others locally. This might change and if there is a vacuum, it will be filled quickly.
Uber is a poor example of dominant American companies. They don’t really have a moat and they don’t really provide a better service than the alternatives in Europe. I don’t think people would miss them much if they left.
The famous companies with a moat are Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon(AWS) since they're vertically integrated so no start-up stands a chance of competing or like Reddit and you hold a large userbase knowledge repository.
Food delivery companies, ride sharing companies, flight & boarding booking companies are all expendable. If one goes down, another one will spring up tomorrow.
Yes, and I don’t see them moving away any time soon. It’s too much on their balance sheets (Europe is a bigger market than China for Apple, and the other two are deeply embedded with the local administrations and companies). All of them are following the legislative frameworks and adapting.
>building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.
This is kind of a FUD fueled false dichotomy, when the truth is we can't know if the EU doesn't have time or resources if it never tries.
What the US has that EU doesn't is the infinte money to throw in the bonfire at moonshot projects knowing that 99% will fail and the 1% will be hugely successful, but now the market is mature with less untapped opportunities, and the EU doesn't have to spend like the US did to achieve the same results, since we now know what works and what doesn't and how to make an Uber that's compliant with local regulations while using less money.
> but now the market is mature with less untapped opportunities
at a macro level i don’t think things stand still waiting for the europeans to catch up. i think things are moving extremely fast and you either adapt or “stagnate”.
What's "moving" right now besides overhyped and unprofitable generative AI and AI chat bots, most of which are trained on copyrighted content and can be regulated away with a piece of paper when copyright holders lobby enough?
> building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.
This is a smartphone app that buys a local service that already exists, it's not hard... In fact alternatives already exist.. I mean of course they do cmon.
On the flip side do you realise the lithographic tech used to build your Intel fabs come from EU? (ASML) building an alternative to that will take serious time and resources. EU is not some third world country.
