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Comment by rini17 | Hacker News Reader

The real problem was that Silicon Valley was flooded with capital and bought out all competitors. Or undercut with free. Or all kinds of other Microsoftlike practices. So nobody was left in the EU to advocate for better rules.

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If that is true, how come new competitors spring up all the time in Silicon Valley and other places in the US while the European sector lies dormant?

That's just a US propaganda myth people can't stop parroting. The SV ecosystem is definitely better funded, but there is no lack of digital start-ups in the EU.

Consider what happened to Nokia. The first business blunder caused it to be sold to US and gutted. Now if someone else wants to make smartphones in EU, has to start from scratch. But if that happens to US company, everything(at least the IP) stays in the US.

Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?

I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.

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