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trollsmurf t1_j2wezrr wrote

But at the same time I think we've completely sucked at the commercial Internet, be it social media, search, Internet advertising, cloud hosting, e-commerce etc. We have nothing that's even close to the by now monopolies in USA (in order: Meta, Google, Google/Meta, Amazon/Microsoft etc, Amazon (maybe Wish too)). One factor is that we don't have the "wild west" financing industry USA has. A second is that regulations likely would have stopped phenomena like privacy surveillance (as performed by primarily Meta). Then we have Chinese companies that have been extremely successful also outside China, e.g. Alibaba and TikTok.

A multi-language issue causing too small "pools" for social media? I don't think so. We simply had too few companies even attempting to compete from day one.

So are we stronger than USA in new areas like AI/ML, robotics and space travel then? I rather see that China is stronger than or as strong as USA, and EU is definitely behind USA too.

So what is it that we are "pro-competition" about then? Transport? Music?

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Formal-Cow-9996 t1_j2ye6ae wrote

There's a few pretty important European (and EU) companies on the internet.

On my phone I have:

the Ecosia search engine (based in Germany, it plants trees every x times I search something), Bolt (in Estonia, basically a cooler Uber with scooters), TooGoodToGo (Denmark, it lets me find good deals for food that would otherwise be thrown away), Spotify (Sweden) and Deezer (France, but American majority stake), I have a few travelling apps like Booking.com (from the Netherlands), Trivago (German but American-majority stake) and Skyscanner (from Ireland but the majority stake is Chinese) and my antivirus is from a pretty big European company while my banking app is a European start-up (but I'm not gonna share them online for security concerns!). There's also the Reuters and Ryanair app, but they did not start as digital companies.

And those are the apps I currently have on my phone, there's a lot more that I don't have - this is the first time I check my apps' countries of origin. I know Supercell is Finnish, Vinted is Lithuanian. There's also certain notable apps from the UK when it was an EU member like (funnily enough) Onlyfans - and Cyprus is the preferred legal residence of many adult-content companies. Opera is also from Norway (not in the EU but in the EEA, with the same regulations).

Overall, I think we as Europeans missed the social media boom during the 2000s but we are catching up now in other areas with less established leaders since the late 2010s and early 2020s.

As for new areas, I know the Dutch ASML holds the de-facto monopoly on microchip-making, Denmark and Spain have the biggest renewable energy companies (4 out of the 5 biggest companies), and France has the two most important recycling companies. You should also check all of those things because it might have changed with the pandemic (and there must be other areas that I missed)

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