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What is the cause of Europe always needing a top-down effort for a European cloud, a European payment provider, a European Facebook and Google, a European X, Y, Z rather than European companies filling these gaps naturally? It's a wealthy union of 450 million people - surely there are benefits for local companies like knowledge of the local business environment, people who fluently speak local languages - why are American companies eating their breakfast?

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Europe is too decentralized. Each country has its own languages, cultures, laws, and politics. If you leave things to the market, the chances are you get a large number of regional solutions tailored to the local conditions. None of which is clearly superior to the others, and all of which are too small to benefit from economies of scale.

And then bigger companies from countries with larger domestic markets come and buy the most successful ones.

I belive it's a chicken/egg problem. A new card won't be accepted anywhere so no buyers will want one, and vendors won't implement a new card unless there are enough buyers to be worth it.

I believe EU could think of making adoption mandatory among merchants (UE-based or not) doing business with UE citizens.

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