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This would be a good move for the EU. If they faithfully clone a competitor, especially one more utility-focused (i.e. taking public funding) than marketing-focused, Americans would ditch facebook faster than people left Digg.

I have doubts about the EU's ability to execute on that, but all they need to do is give people the exact same shit without the contamination of Meta, and make data import from facebook seamless.

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France and Germany tried their hand at a publicly funded Google (search engine) competitor [0]. It is also worth reading up on EU projects such as Galileo and Gaia-X. If history is any guide, it would not likely go according to plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

Not sure about Galileo, but Gaia-X is not an EU project. It's a project started by a group of private companies, just because they are companies located in the EU, it does not make it an EU project.

Anyway, Gaia-X will definitely be a flop, or rather, will remain vaporware IMHO.

> France and Germany tried their hand at a publicly funded Google (search engine) competitor [0].

From linked wiki page:

> The consortium was led by Thomson SA.

As an ex-Technicolor employee, it doesn’t surprise me that this went nowhere.

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