Are you aware of any innovation or successful startups that came out of the EU in the last 5 years? How can you regulate a field you have no players in?
I think what is true is that it is harder to get VC backed capital here, and hence a lot of “winner takes all” markets are won in the US. But that doesn’t mean that there is no striving startup scene in Europe, they just have different goals or measures of success than “grow a lot”.
Regulating that might even help European companies :-)
Growth is a must - large companies are market makers and a continent without them will become dependent on the ones that have them.
Bought out is also fine - that how you get investment capital.
Regulation only helps incumbent companies though, which is exactly the problem in EU.
European telecom companies are large tech companies, heavily regulated and successful. Yes, they are incumbents now. But they weren't always; at least not all of them.
It's easy to see why: all the startups loudly hailed as successful are running into billions of dollars of debt every year, but keep being propped up by unlimited investor money. In any other industry this would be a failure.
They would if not for the infinite subsidies
> Are you saying all those investors are dumb and just burning money for the fun of it?!
For example, Uber has not been profitable for a single year in its 10 years of existence.
Same goes for most if YCombinator's "top companies".
In which other industry can you lose money (often billions of dollars a year) and still be in business and claim you're successful.
There is no such thing. Private money is finite, it ends up eventually as investors want ROIs.
> Uber has not been profitable
Actually, they announced their first profitable quarter in 2023.
> In which other industry can you lose money (often billions of dollars a year) and still be in business and claim you're successful.
Well in the Government business, of course! Deficits around the world keep increasing and governments borrow trillions they never pay back.
Sorry, disqualified according to your own arbitrary rules.
And regarding AI startups there's about a bazillion of them in EU, just as in the US. Sure, ChatGPT was invented by a US company but you can't really claim that there's "nothing" in the EU. Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
But I am happy to be proved wrong, thats why I asked in the first place.
Off the top of my head, but some of these are older than 5 years: Spotify, Voi, Revolut, Ledger, Aiven.