It’s a tale as old as time: start a war to support the military industrial complex. Imagine a $4 billion investment into public transportation or parks. Every 10 years we can invest into a new city instead of bombing some kids overseas (whose siblings, fueled by hatred, then commit terror attacks on the west).
The United States is a bully in a China shop and that China shop is the world. It constantly destabilizes the Middle East under false pretenses and lets Europe pick up the refugees. It brain drains and takes innovation to be commercialized. It makes money on the hard labor of others.
So yes probably for the best for Europe to do what China is doing and decouple.
Specific examples: Francis Lowell stealing British Loom designs in 1800.
Bessemer steel process replicas.
Bell vs European Telephone patents.
Radio: Marconi was initially backed in the US then Bell filed the patents.
Operation Paperclip and all that entails (thousands of German patents invalidated and filed in the US).
It really is. You could not pay me to tie my business to Google at this point. I need someone I can trust won't just pull the plug in a year when they get bored, and Google isn't that company.
They sold off Google Domains to Squarespace a year or so ago which was irritating because it was super nice to grant DNS record access using employees' Workspace accounts.
It’s objectively easier to build a frontend now and therefore that moat is disappearing.
What you can argue is the moat is in incumbent advantage at the UI layer, not the UI itself.
Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.
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