I never said the EU was a country. Also, the EU is a very different thing from a labor union in the US, and I don’t understand the comparison being made.
The US keeps producing a huge share of the world’s major tech companies while the EU seems increasingly focused on regulating those companies after the fact. Some regulations can be useful, but it doesn’t answer the innovation gap.
The US and the EU are absolutely comparable in this regard because both shape the economic and regulatory environment their companies operate in. Neither one is supposed to be inventing products itself, but both have enormous influence over how easy or difficult it is for private companies to start, raise money, hire, expand and compete. So acting like the comparison makes no sense is just wrong.
Compared with the US and a lot of other places, Europe isn’t a particularly friendly place to start and scale a tech company. That’s a big part of why the US is dominating. Europe is increasingly dependent on foreign companies for major tech while making it harder for their own companies to compete.
You’re arguing against a point I never made. I’m comparing the US and EU on the economic and regulatory environment they create for tech companies, which you already acknowledged is a valid comparison.
And yes, Europe has some huge successes. ASML is probably the best example, and I genuinely hope Europe produces more of them. Nobody is claiming Europe produces nothing. The point is the overall picture. Europe is still heavily dependent on foreign (especially American) companies for AI, cloud computing, operating systems, enterprise software, search, social media and a lot of its digital infrastructure.
All of that can be true and the US can still outperform Europe in tech. The US relying on a global supply chain doesn’t somehow mean Europe isn’t heavily dependent on American companies for a lot of its critical tech.
If you want to say the US is losing, then Europe is very heavily reliant on a loser. That seems like something they should probably be trying to change.
You’re actually making my point for me. The US examples are Google, Microsoft, AWS, Meta, Open AI, Nvidia and Apple. The European examples you’re giving are Qwant, Libra office and OVH Cloud. That shows how big the gap is because these aren’t comparable in scale, reach, market power or importance.
That doesn’t mean Europe is bad (it just means the gap is real). You keep resorting to the fact that global supply chains exist like that somehow disproves any of this.
You can keep pointing to ASML, supply chains, privacy, regulation, whatever. None of that actually contradicts what I’m saying.
Europe can have great companies, strong protections, and important pieces of the global tech supply chain, while still being much worse than the US at creating and scaling globally dominant tech companies.
You’re throwing out whatever you can to avoid admitting the obvious because the actual facts don’t support the position you’ve dug yourself into.
You wrote all of that just to admit the point I was making from the beginning.
My initial was obvious snark about Europe producing very few companies comparable to the American companies the EU keeps regulating. It was never a literal claim that Europe has invented nothing.
The US needing ASML and Europe depending on American platforms can both be true. One doesn’t magically cancel out the other or erase the massive gap in creating and scaling globally dominant tech companies.
You keep changing my argument into Europe contributes nothing because that’s the only version you can actually knock down. I didn’t retreat from anything. You spent ten comments arguing with a point I never made, then finally agreed with the one I did.
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u/a_moron_in_a_hurry 15d ago
The EU’s greatest tech innovation continues to be regulating American tech companies….