That is really total rubbish. How could 1-2 year old regulations go back 30+ years to stifle the European "tech scene"? By the way, there is other technology than that which is used to sell advertising on the internet.
Paying for lawyers, exploring utilizing local business networks to avoid headaches, and countless special edge cases is a great deterannce from offering services/products there... Let alone building actual companies and teams from there.
It's worth remembering that Silicon Valley got started way back in the 50s with Shockley's transistors. Then Microsoft in the 80s and Amazon, Google in the 1990s.
What was going on in Europe during these times?
For most of the 20th century continental Europe was a hotbed of dictators and extremists. The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything. The second half saw dictatorships across all of eastern Europe that kept it impoverished, there were dictatorships in Spain and Greece and significant political instability and corruption for decades in Italy.
Britain, which came out of WW2 the strongest having been on the winning side, was nonetheless totally wrecked and worse still, the population concluded that the government must be pretty good at things due both to the victory and years of news suppression which prevented people learning about government errors (e.g. Exercise Tiger). So Britain became strongly socialist and remained that way until Thatcher in the 80s. The economic destruction this socialist environment wrecked was extreme enough that the UK had to go to the IMF for a bailout and was suffering things like electricity shortages during the worst periods of the 1970s. It was a place where even established businesses struggled to survive, so the idea of a startup culture or creating advanced tech firms was totally absurd - the government had given up even attempting to fix things and unions under the control of Marxists were practically shadow governments in and of themselves.
In other words, if you look at the time that the USA was establishing startups like Intel that'd become huge tech firms, which then spawned generations of technically skilled VCs, Europe was mostly either actual communist dictatorships or so hard left that the idea of creating dynamic new businesses was a pipe dream. There was no environment in which to create the generations of successful entrepreneurs that America benefits from.
Interestingly, Germany did much better than Britain during this time because - having had their faith in government wisdom destroyed by the Nazis - Germany deregulated and experienced much better economic growth, despite having been cleaved in half by the Soviets. This sowed the seeds of German economic strength dominating the Euro today.
Things only really changed for most of Europe in the 1990s with the fall of the USSR, reunification of Germany and Thatcher's reforms having turned around the UK. But then Europe collectively decided that the right path into the future was to slowly merge together under a vast centralised bureaucracy centred in Brussels, one which had its roots in the Ventotene Manifesto, a document written by communists in the 40s. Remarkably, the EU to this day still has never really shaken a vague sense that communism was roughly in the right area. Its ultra-powerful unaccountable Commission President (Juncker) routinely makes statements like "when it gets serious, you have to lie" and he travelled to the birthplace of Karl Marx where he defended Marx's legacy:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-jea...
The EU has historically often had former communists in its most senior positions and does things in ways that are reminiscent of the USSR (e.g. a Parliament that can't actually overrule the unelected parts of the government). No surprise that it takes an ambivalent view of business, especially successful American business, and largely defines itself as a defender of The People against Capital.
Combined with no culture of granting equity and we have today's situation.
What about Japan's rise from a bombed out, defeated nation to a G7 economic power and world leader in electronics and automotives in the same time period?
Japan lost comprehensively enough to destroy any notion that their government was good, and had a huge US involvement in the rebuild. IOW they were rebuilt along US lines and, like Germany, benefited from the "loser's victory" in which they avoided a sharp turn towards big government.
During the same era the UK lost its own car manufacturing industry, with aggressive unions and general industrial malaise being the prime culprits.
Per Wikipedia Tommy Flowers couldn't get a bank loan because he couldn't cite his cryptoanalysis machines as proof he could do what he claimed he could do. "False concerns of military secrecy" when we were in an existential cold war with international socialism? That put so much of Europe under Soviet occupation?
Or the cited severe lack of funding mechanisms and other things necessary for commercial success, going all the way to the concept of doing stuff outside the aegis of the government which included the public University of Manchester? The latter could and did make numerous record breaking computers, going at least as far as the early 1960s Atlas, a competitive microsecond cycle supercomputer that was the first to page. But this didn't translate into commercial success.
Until ARM was sold to SoftBank it was the primary British high tech computer firm. Little known fact - ARM is one of the very few European tech firms that incentivised its employees with equity sharing. It was and still is standard for firms outside the USA to keep all equity for the founders and investors, with none for early employees.
It's hard to know to what extent Acorn struggled to compete with Apple because of Europe-specific factors vs just bad luck: Acorn computers were very slow to get FCC regulatory approval in the USA, and they had a failure in their supply chain at a critical moment that pushed Brits towards buying US computers instead. They sold 300k machines but could only get 30k from the factories. There were a few other problems that stalled their expansion, and all this was taking place in the context of a country going through a major recession as Thatcher ended a government policy of employment targeting to bring inflation under control (inflation hit 22% in 1980). In the end they never recovered - US firms grew too strong and outcompeted them, despite initially stronger technology. Given that Acorn and ARM showed the same cycle of former employees becoming entrepreneurs and investors themselves, it's possible if things had worked out a bit differently for Acorn it could have been the "British Apple" and seeded a British computer industry competitive with Silicon Valley. But - it didn't.
Bad luck indeed, although looking at the details of e.g. the Acorn Electron which had that production bottleneck doesn't suggest they had significantly stronger technology at the time, pretty much all 6502 based stuff like their competition except for e.g. the also local Sinclair Research with its Z80 based systems. In the US market there was also the Z80 based and monstrously successful Tandy TRS-80, per Wikipedia significantly outselling the Apple II for a long period.
Tandy also had a huge retail network to sell its wares, it's Radio Shack stores were the place to buy random basic electronic stuff all over the USA. Per Wikipedia, in 1982 4,300 company stores and 2,000 independent franchises in towns not big enough for a company store. One reason I mention this is to ask, how big was it in the U.K. post-WWII until Thatcher? It became a very big thing the US in the 1950s, combining local capital and market focus with centralized and bulk product planning, technology, marketing, and often purchasing.
Hmmmm, Tandy also did a Motorola 6809 based "Color Computer" of some note, but its expensive/superior CPU prompted them to forgo things that made competing 6502 systems more popular, like built in sound and graphics for e.g. games. There was also a very American cottage industry style market in Z80 CP/M systems built around the S-100 bus.
I think the general macro-economic and social conditions may explain why Acorn was rare, whereas the US birthed many such companies. But then again, the UK has less than a quarter of the population of the USA, so presumably that right there should slash the number of companies.
I've also done a focus switch in this discussion, from all of Europe to just the UK. The rest of Europe was still very messed up outside of west Germany and the small northern states, either dictatorships, or just exited from dictatorship, or were France:
https://uramericansinparis.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/france-i...
West Germany gave birth to SAP in 1972, UK gave birth to Acorn and a few other small computer firms that didn't really make it, only SAP and ARM still survive and only one independent. I don't know of any big French tech firms from this era, but maybe there is one.
So I guess Acorn and maybe SAP are the exceptions that highlight just how dire conditions were in most of Europe at this time.