No offense, but you don't seem to understand how monopolization works. A company can offer a great product and slowly buy up the other competitors or make deals with other parts of the supply chain in order to achieve a monopoly. How many people choose a Microsoft OS when they buy their Intel processor? This choice is rarely, if ever, made by the end consumer.

>The irony, of course, is that Amazon itself does work in Europe. The delivery times are long, but you can order in almost any corner of the EU.

That's exactly the problem, Amazon now has a monopoly here as well and kills competition. Delivery times aren't long at all, that's never been the problem. But it's much easier to conquer the entire US market and then have the necessary ressources and know-how to set up offices in every European country and deal with several different customs regimes than the other way around. Single market and customs union improved this since the 90s, but it's still a work in progress (like I tried to explain).

Logically, logistically, statistically.. it just makes zero sense to expect a mega-corporation like Amazon to come out of the fractured European market which additionally does a better job at preventing monopolization than the DoJ in the US. I don't know if we've established this yet, but something like Amazon isn't necessarily good for our economy to begin with.

>But when it comes to an OS the first mover advantage was so long ago.

And therefore they had more than enough time to create an almost unbreakable monopoly. Right?

>Google also wasn't the first search engine. Nor are they the last - there are already other alternatives. Even some European ones, but they aren't as good.

I would argue that Google survives purely on name recognition and brand familiarity. And of course through monopolization. How many average users consciously type in google.com even a single time in their life? They just enter the searched phrase in their URL line and their browser defaults to Google. In most important ways (privacy, data protection etc) Google is much worse than many alternatives - European and American.

Arguing that Google somehow offers a better user experience for the average person sounds.. not well thought through at best, but actually quite disingenuous.

>How come there is no Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Apple or... equivalent in Europe?

You're asking why there is a lack of monopolization of digital services in Europe under a post about more successful European antitrust laws.

Jokes aside, the EU currently has no (or a very underdeveloped) digital single market. Imagine living in Utah and ordering something from Amazon only for transaction not to go through because the item can only be sent to Arizona. That stuff still happens in the EU all the time. That's why a European Amazon is wishful thinking until the digital single market is complete or at least mature and comparable to the US service market.

Apple: Europe had Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson,... who were some of the most successful phone companies on the planet, but they were bought by foreign competitors or pulled out of the phone industry altogether in large part because of the missing infrastructure and most of all accumulated capital in the EU to keep the expertise here. The EU made it much easier for other tech to either stay in Europe or re-shore back to Europe, e.g. battery technology, electric vehicles, space and aviation industries, renewable energy..

Microsoft and Google: First mover advantage of the US. Just a 2-3 year lead in the software sector will result in the monopolization of parts of it. Microsoft and Google are great examples of that. One massive achievement was EU legislation that forces these companies to stop exclusive in-house development of all the technology they use and stop them from buying every small competitor or provider of a service they use. Imagine a car company that buys every single adjacent company that even remotely touches their supply chains until nothing is left to challenge them. That's what Microsoft and Google did. The study points out the lack of US oversight in this regard.

This is a wildly misinformed comment that echos deeply but wrongly held beliefs about Europe in North America - both among laymen but also journalists. Let's look at the metrics you mentioned in which the US supposedly significantly outperformed the EU economy.

> measured by metrics of employment

Ignoring all the statistical cosmetics with technical definitions of who constitutes an "unemployed" person, we can simply look at the labour participation rate in both markets (figure 2). Not only is the EU trend positive, while the US trend is negative, the EU even caught up a massive discrepancy of ~10% in the last two decades which is also the time frame focused on in this study (80s and 90s -> setting up of regulators, 00s and 10s -> regulators making the EU single market more competitive).

> growth

This will inevitably re-ignite the also painfully misinformed debate about measuring GDP nominally vs purchasing power adjustments, but going with the latter reveals that the EU despite more direct disruptions (fall of the USSR, euro crisis, Brexit, recently the energy crisis/Russia's 2nd invasion of Ukraine) grew more or less at the same pace as the US economy. Since we're talking about growth here specifically, I'm sure we can all agree it makes sense to filter out noise from conversion rates and internal devaluation in the PIGS economies following the euro debt crisis. All of this despite the fact that the US population grew faster, meaning that GDP/capita in the EU has consistently grown faster for almost two decades. This is not just true for the new memberstates in CEE either, but a broad pattern across most EU countries (albeit much less pronounced in traditionally rich countries like Germany or Denmark).

>inflation

Ever since the introduction of the single currency, the eurozone and the US followed a very similar monetary strategy and therefore experienced similar inflation until very recently. Were it not for the war in eastern Europe, the eurozone actually proved to be more resiliant initially in the direct aftermath of Covid-19.

Those are my thoughts. I've been trying to argue these points for years, but to little avail to the overall perception. The narrative that Europe is an economic slump compared to the US isn't supported by the data, let alone that the difference is significant. Europe has slightly outperformed the US in every metric you have picked. We can even look at other indicators like fiscal responsibility. Government debt to GDP ratio or the annual goverment fiscal deficit - both of which are strongly believed to be European problems because of Italy and Greece - clearly show that the EU outperformed the US for quite some time.

EDIT: Typos.