Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration
peoplevsbig.tech
peoplevsbig.tech
There is a simple path to EU sovereignity, china has already done it: Ban US services in order to spring up local alternatives. Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling. then you won't have to bother with "big tech".
But all of that would require doing actual work, and judging by the list of signatories, they don't want to do it.
Social media, yes. There are no network effects on most other "big tech" mono/oligopolies - using Google vs Bing vs Kagi or Claude.ai vs ChatGPT vs Gemini or Android vs iOS (other than in the US) or BackMarket vs Amazon vs AliExpress, etc.
In addition, every example you had benefits from traditional network effects: Amazon is a two sided marketplace with sellers and buyers.
Google connect searchers to websites, who in return allow Googlebot to scrape them freely (unlike your IP) - and also rank results by the way other users clicked.
The business of Google and Bing is not providing searches in exchange for fees (that is a tiny tiny part of their business) but rather advertising. And there is for sure network effects for ad networks. Advertisers wanna advertise on the platform that has more eyeballs. Why are Google ads selling at a premium vs Bing Ads? Because more advertisers wanna use Google Ads because that is where 90% of search traffic is. If I start my own search engine with a 1000 users per day no one is going to buy ads for that search engine.
Of course one could say that search should not be a free service (paid by ads) and instead everyone should just pay for a search engine like Kagi. But that is not the reality we live in.
It certainly was very different - maybe less clear that it will remain so.
The whole tariffs debacle, the threat that the US won't back NATO allies in the event of Russian aggression, wavering US support for Ukraine... The EU is starting to see a need to pivot away from reliance on the US.
Without that relationship, a lot of US tech firm offerings are going to look much worse (i.e. we might quickly see an end to overlooking blatant tax evasion and GDPR violations)
Even more reason that the EU should work as hard as possible to get rid of their reliance on American companies. America is no longer a trusted partner.
+1
Nobody cares about company fundamentals anymore, so for most Americans this would be a trading opportunity. Many will buy the dip and the stocks with rise back even if half of their revenue streams are gone.
They really should aggressively push this though
The former is to some extend a consequence of the latter, which is a consequence of EU being a confederation and not a federation, we have N smaller markets all competing with each other. Who do we kid other than ourselves by expressing that we can compete?
We are fundamentally and structurally crippled and as long as we think ourselves $Nationalify first and Europeans second, we are doomed to stay second if not third.
I'd argue for open protocols that allow exporting your data and switching services instead. Make export capabilities a requirement akin to data protection laws, and you have defanged the monopolistic nature of tech. Ideally also force interoperability between services, but that's a whole other can of worms.
This is on paper obviously much harder than just banning something, because you would have to define such exchange protocols, but it has a chance of success. One could start with certain industries, like social media, and in some cases build on existing work, like the AT or ActivityPub protocols.
But I have to agree that actual alternatives are a prerequisite for changing anything about the dominance of the US tech sector
If the corporations conduct business in the EU, they must abide by EU regulation. How this impacts the corporations in practice is not EU's concern. Requiring a break up seems sensible given the situation.
> Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling
No, tech itself isn't inherently monopolistic. Companies that operate with centralized resources are. The solution is technology that operates in a decentralized way, which has existed since the dawn of the internet. The main reason companies don't like it is precisely because it doesn't allow them to control resources and hoard capital.
At a mass scale, the users on the network are not sophisticated or trained, and end up having very common failures that result in a move to a trusted central authority.
Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content?
Bad actors alone, are a sufficient force that generates social pressure that drives centralization through regulation.
But thats an easy example, the other force is the unsophistication of the average person - as a result they gravitate towards tools that simplify their lives, and do a lot of the work they are not interested in doing.
When network effects come into play, this creates a pressure where firms with more resources buy smaller players and consolidate, once again creating a small network.
People don’t want to deal with the over head of creating new accounts for example, or the overhead of moving their content from X service to Y.
By way of analogy, I'm sure that the vast majority of people purchase their appliances from a couple of big brands. However, because the various hookups are standardized, there is still a reasonably large market of alternatives. Similarly, early in the internet most people used, for example, AOL Instand Messenger; however, due to interopperability it wasn't unheard of for someone to use something like Trillian.
I'm sure that wouldn't be enough to fully solve the problem of big tech having too much power, but it would probably significantly help.
They've been more successful when they're limited, generic, and allow for up- and downstream innovation. E.g. HTTP
It's good enough for most use cases, and a more efficient (and complex) standard wouldn't have been as generalizable.
Not necessarily. Systems built on decentralized protocols can still avoid centralization. We see this with core internet protocols (DNS, BGP, TCP/IP, SMTP, etc.), and modern protocols alike (BitTorrent, XMPP, Matrix, most blockchains, etc.).
It's true that many people may gravitate towards a specific service operating on one of these protocols for whatever reason, and particularly with federated protocols, but it wouldn't be correct to say that e.g. Gmail or Cloudflare DNS are centralized in the same way that e.g. Google Ads or YouTube is.
Even when services built on decentralized protocols become popular, decentralization avoids vendor lock-in by definition, and users are free to choose any other service according to their needs. It also avoids monopolies since anyone else can build a competing service that caters to the same market.
> Your account got taken over? Need to reverse transactions? Need recourse if someone defrauded you? Don’t want to check each factoid you read? Need to ensure that users are not spreading actual terror content?
All of those are service concerns. Yes, they are easier to address when the system is centralized, but not impossible otherwise. The main reason we don't have good decentralized solutions to them is because companies have no incentive to invent them. And in the cases when they do exist, they have no incentive to use them.
I believe this is in large part due to the failing of the WWW to be decentralized from the start. Its original proposal[1] included a phase 2 of the project where "authorship becomes universal", which failed to materialize. This made it lucrative for hosting companies to fill a functional void, which gave way to tech giants, social media, and Big Tech as we know it today. I think we still would've had a need for centralized services regardless, but they would've been much less popular and powerful than they are today.
DNS is hierarchical, so of course every provider will ultimately peer with the same root servers. And TLDs definitely aren't centralized. They're managed by different companies, and users can use any number of registrars.
The fact that Google is the largest email provider doesn't mean they have a monopoly on email. That's ridiculous.
Yes, they can take advantage of their position to influence the market and strengthen their position, which would be illegal. They're arguably doing that with Chrome, as Microsoft did decades ago with IE, but that's a legal matter.
The difference with email is that it's possible to use it without depending on Google at all. It is a public service not controlled by any single entity precisely because decentralization is built into the protocols. Again, the popularity of individual providers makes no difference.
Google in and of itself is decentralized from an engineering perspective. There's no giga-computer in Mountain View that all search requests funnel though. It's a highly distributed system, much like the internet itself - just a distributed system that a single entity controls.
The issue isn't central or decentralized systems or engineering. It's centralized OWNERSHIP and CONTROL. That is the aspect that needs to get cracked open... what a monopoly is to a capitalism, is what this is to the internet.
That incentivizes continuous innovation as a defendable moat, not hoarding users and their data and high switching costs.
To emphasize that a bit; I argue what we need is public, open standards that, e.g., prevent social media lock-in or make government computer and networking contracts open to real competition, not just Microsoft licensed resellers competing on who adds less middleman markup.
Academia produces simple standards at good interface points -> industry evolves (with community/regulators pushing back on unnecessary complexity) -> standard published -> competition laws written to require use of standard
If there were an EU-mandated ad marketplace standard, then competitors to Google could spring up, and we wouldn't have the centralization we do now.
Governments have a bad track record in picking winners and losers, but a decent one in fostering competitive marketplaces by mandating use of interoperable standards.
The so called "network effect" is entirely artificial.
When the FAANG-level companies did not exist yet, services were designed to be interoperable, and those system stood the test of time.
Trivial example: e-mail/SMTP and BGP.
In an ideal world we d all be decentralized but the world is not ideal. The world has gravitated towards centralization in all the networking levels
That's not true. There are _many_ other, not few, email providers to choose from besides Gmail.
> If you are not on good terms with them , email does not get delivered.
It's not like all email goes through Gmail... If for some reason your mail server is flagged by Gmail's systems, then it only won't reach Gmail users.
> Hence why every professional uses a cloud mailers.
That's not true either. Many people self-host their email servers, and don't have any issues. Protocols like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF ensure the integrity of the sender, and all major providers obey them. These days with projects like Mox and Mail-in-a-Box it's also trivially easy to run your own server.
So services built on decentralized protocols remain decentralized precisely because decentralization was a key design choice. This idea that the world gravitates towards centralization is false.
This is a deal breaker for most people and organizations. Not being able to send email to the largest email provider is orders of magnitude more important than upholding some values about decentralization and independence.
If you're not allowed to shop at Walmart, that might be an inconvenience, but it doesn't stop you from shopping anywhere else. That is the point of decentralized protocols. They prevent a single entity from creating a monopoly over the entire market. It's not just a philosophical argument about independence.
Besides, even Gmail obeys standard email features like DKIM, DMARC and SPF. As long as your server is not on the same network as known spammers, and doesn't have the usual spam signals, there is little chance that your emails will be blocked.
Yes, any company can take advantage of their position to influence the market, and in most cases this is illegal.
If a manufacturer only offers their products in Walmart, and some users can't access Walmart, then that's a problem specific to that provider and manufacturer. And the same applies for Gmail. *This is not because decentralized protocols "trend" towards centralization.* It is because there will always be popular providers that people gravitate towards for whatever reason. But again, this doesn't prevent anyone from using email without depending on Google _at all_.
The difference from that situation and issues caused by actual centralization is night and day. I'll stop replying to this kind of rebuttal, since it seems people struggle to understand the difference.
Eh, I would phrase it differently -- decentralized protocols ensure that new competition can stand up services.
There's nothing about them that inherently prevents monopolies from forming, as this thread discusses re:Gmail. Usually there are enough value adds around the decentralized protocol that a smart first mover can establish a de facto monopoly.
Your framing is wrong - network effects exist. Before the surveillance industry took over, the network effects accrued to protocols. Hence the popularity of SMTP (et al).
Competitive regulation, on either side of the pond, wouldn't focused on blindly "breaking up" tech companies. Rather it starts with declaring that hosted services and client software are separate products/markets, and that tying the two types of products together is anti-competitive. Thus any hosted server functionality that a proprietary webapp or mobileapp front end uses, must be through a openly published API for other competing apps to also access.
Users can then choose competing apps, and services have an incentive to make their APIs match existing apps (to facilitate easy switching to them). And with that same API, competing hosted services can access content published on the original hosted service - federation naturally falls out. In other words, preventing companies from creating friction so that network effects accrue to themselves will make the network effects accrue to protocols/interfaces again.
The DOJ is literally asking Google be broken up...
Yeah. Big tech bad, but big non-elected government (EU) good?
The problem seems to be that there is no real coherence to expanding local companies beyond their origin countries. Partially because of other competitors, which each country wants to promote their own, and partially because the whole infrastructure for serving ~30 states is a headache.
IMO major benefits would come from investing heavily into translation AI tech. Europe will never have one main language, and so it won’t have the single unified cultural market that China or the US have. But that can be reduced dramatically to make it as seamless as possible.
Those publishers don't have to be listed by Google, they can opt out, right? Let's assume Google disappears, how are publishers getting more money that they are getting now? Do they envision some publishers' owned search engine more efficient than Google which people flock to once other options are removed? Can someone convince me that Google is actually bad for traditional publishers/journalists?
Second, the lack of proper competition in the ad market cannot be healthy for the cost of advertising. It's impossible to become a competitor to Google without sinking billions in costs. There is no pressure on the price so traditional publishers pay way too much for the ads. That ad may never be served, because Google renders a summary of your content next to the search results; and if a user would visit the site regardless, there is AMP - Google sells you ads and then deploys middleware to prevent you from serving them.
One thing that I do believe could be relevant is regulation that forces open the platforms- social media and messaging as an open standard. Now that the technical underpinnings of it are well understood I don't know why we couldn't have an open standard for making posts that my real friends could see and rich-media standard for me sending messages and being in group messages. It's ridiculous that we're locked into these messaging platforms that want to show us ads when the tech to run these things is well understood and should be commodified in a more open market. The cost of switching should be near zero.
If the big companies were legally required to allow you to migrate your group texts onto another platform with a push of a button then I would say you're not locked in anymore.
Companies would complain that "it's not technically possible"- but of course we all know it's completely doable.
The feeling that you’re locked is more a psychological barrier you have to pass than anything else
Even though it's just a text message reaction we need to hold these product managers accountable for purposely making messaging an iOS person a worse experience in the name of selling more iPhones. The micro-aggression enshittification of stepping outside this walled garden adds up in the end to anti-competitive behavior.
Dismissing their behavior by pretending that there are viable alternatives is actually making things worse, not better.
Even without regulation I think there could be a chance that open platforms gain traction- but only because there's just enough money, enough profit motive and enough public political sentiment for people to switch (I'm thinking of BlueSky).
giant big tech data leak:https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-billion-passwords-apple-facebo... yesterday?
And remedies are often pocket money.
For Microsoft Windows, antitrust authorities and courts did not do anything.
The situation feels a little bit different, given that they in this case the ones going up against a deeply-entrenched web monopoly, with a fork of that monopoly's own codebase...
The problem was not enough anti-trust, not that it doesn't work.
And certainly the big tech (here's looking at you Google and FaceBook et al) business model is propaganda. As is the business model of the Washington Post (here's looking at you Jeff Bezos) and the New York Times.
If the messaging in a society is used to persuade rather than listen things break. A simplistic model of is social insects. If ants can't leave a pheromone trail, or if some ants lead misleading trails, the colony will die. It will not be able to adapt.
Breaking up big tech is appealing, but it does not change the fact that we now "live" in the internet and that the current internet is a gigantic propaganda machine.
If there were 100 equal market share ad space providers, what Google does wouldn't have the same impact it does now.
I mean, look at the lobotomized hellscape YouTube's engagement-optimized algorithm has turned its monetized content into, to say nothing of the broader internet, as proof its monopoly hasn't been for the greater good.
https://esgnews.com/ai-boom-drives-150-surge-in-indirect-emi...
Exploiting basic human psychology to incite people to come back to consume whatever you're giving them (small dopamine hits) doesn't absolve the people doing it, but it doesn't absolve the people exploiting it either.
> “altering the human mind at will” is a pretty wild claim
How is it wild? Humans are social animals, and there have been numerous studies on the effect of social media on teenagers (up to and including body dysmorphia and suicides) or politics, including influencing the results of referenda or elections, or even starting riots.
Short of moving to a cabin in the woods, network effects hold us all hostage to the mind-altering, ad-delivering, capitalism machine
Having a smartphone doesn't have to mean being subjected to algorithmic feeds, advertising and corporate spying. Keeping in touch with friends doesn't have to be mediated by billionaires. All you have to do is be willing to have a life that isn't 100% convenient at all times in every direction.
Signal is free and cross platform. There is literally no reason people can't download and use it instead of the other messengers.
GrapheneOS is nearly perfect and works with every single app I've tried, including finance and travel.
Web versions of apps exist.
You can actually ask the people you care about to change their behavior for you, underlining all the risks with the current way. People act as if downloading a new app is an insurmountable task. It'll just sit there and send notifications. What's this mental block people have?
You can do SO MANY things before moving to a cabin in the woods.
The door of the prison is unlocked, dude. You don't have to stay inside just cuz you're used to being there.
You can, and I do, but that is really only the very tippy-top of the iceberg.
I have convinced my close friends to join me on Signal. I can't convince most of my acquaintances to use it, nor most of the business I work with in Europe, so I have to have WhatsApp to communicate with them - complete with Stories and Meta AI which can't be disabled.
I get most of my contracting work through personal referrals, so I need to keep in touch with people I've worked with in the past. They are all still deep in the tech world and not looking to divest, so I pretty much have to meet them where they are - turns out to be a combo of LinkedIn + Facebook.
I also run a meat-space business, so I have to maintain a Google Maps presence or no one can find me. Have to maintain Facebook and Instagram pages or nobody finds out about our events. And so on...
So every time you say yes to that meeting, in an unsafe place, and don't attempt (or demand) to redirect that meeting to a safer place, you are perpetuating unsafety for everyone.
If you don't consider it to be your ethical duty you should at the very least be doing it purely out of self interest.
Certainly there are things that people can do to be less reliant on big tech. However, being a part of society still requires a lot of reliance on big tech.
For instance the web: noscript/basic (x)html for all dominant/critical online services, where reasonable. Or you will be jailed into the 2.5 engines of the whatng cartel. A few years back I could buy thingies with wallet codes using lynx/links/elinks/netsurf/w3m/etc web browsers on amazon.fr... now you MUST have a whatng web engine... how convenient... and recently, noscript browsers (which have a "non famous" user agent string), won't be able to perform a search on google anymore...
Video streaming sites can put text ads (clearly identified) into a 2D HTML document and can provide HLS/dash/etc <video>&|<audio> URLs (and can inject ads into the video stream if they want to) which the browser will send to a media player.
Chatting? One-time-usage IRC bridge URL with optional custom IRC commands which the browser will send to a IRC client?
Namely, you can augment this noscript/basic (x)html portal with some "web APIs" or even leaner(simpler?) protocols, with proper online publication and definition ofc.
The same attention should be given to the usage of PDF too. Generating a PDF with only utf-8 text should be "easy" and it is actually not really the case.
And the list goes on.
And you cannot 'break up' US companies, but you can make them "behave" if they want to do business in EU, and don't forget they have the backing of funds with thousands of billions of $ and they already have their own billions, in other words: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition here as they can spend out of business everybody (what they usually do over cycles of ~5-10 years or even longer) or "buy" anybody (until properly "disabled", then they are thrown away).
Don't forget about EU companies and gov administrations too... those can be straighten with much more convincing.
Basically the benchmark is the following: where appropriate, it should be "reasonable" for a few average devs/one average dev, with a lean SDK (including the programming language), to write real-life alternatives (citizen/local/commercial).
>>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)
>>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary
>>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)
>>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it
>>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist
>>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day
>>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts
I am sure that once they kick Google out they will make some innovation fund where many government officials find work. Then the money is going to be transferred to the newly sprung industry of innovation grant appliers. It will be a lot of money for a lot of people. In the middle of it a new search engine arises - made by a disgruntled European in Singapore.
>>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)
This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.
>>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary
False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.
>>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)
You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.
>>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it
We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.
>>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist
You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.
>>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day
Spanish bureaucracy is as slow as in anywhere else, but it is indeed digitized. You are required to file your tax forms (available in English btw) digitally, and you can register a business, get your SSN, etc., with a digital certificate from your computer. I've only had to show up in person once in the last five years to register my address after moving to a new city.
>>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts
This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.
Who do you think is going to build/finance businesses if not people with significant NW? Also central government removed Andalucia's and Madrid's exemptions lately.
>>False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.
Add health care and employer contributions.
>>You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.
I am "cherry picking" the case that applies to me. If I live in Spain they would take around 4% of my net worth every year just for me being there. That's an expensive proposition.
>>We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.
Major problem in EU is that we don't have a common language. Teaching English and making it 2nd official language everywhere should be a top priority. Otherwise we will never have the start American companies have. You will not built a big company if you can't hire and work in English. Tech sector won't happen if tech people don't speak a common language. It will not be Spanish/French/German or Polish (my own).
>>You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.
Not my experience sadly.
>>This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.
There are multiple reports of foreigners living in Spain living for vacation and having their house taken away by ocupas.
See the Apple USB-C case.
Across most of Europe (not all - the Baltic states have produced quite a few unicorns) there’s a pervasive attitude that technology is… icky. Struggling to come up with a better way of putting it, but at best entrepreneurship in tech is met with blank incomprehension, and at worst sneering contempt. People use it, unthinkingly, but to be interested in it, to invest in it, seems to fall into the category of “we must have world peace before we spend money on space exploration”.
Yes, this is hand-wavy, but in my experience as a tech entrepreneur in Europe, if you want investment, you talk to the Americans. If you want a growth market, you target the Americans. If you don’t want to be justifying your price tag 20 times a day… you get the picture.
Of course there exist incubators, funds, and so-forth, but the money on the table is a pittance compared to the U.S., and again, the culture here is like “why don’t you get a real job, train as a lawyer, a doctor, or a banker, and stop playing video games?” when you’re running a profitable technical startup.
Generalising a whole continent with such nonsense is... bold. Any data to back this up? Surveys? Anything? There are tons of people in tech, and tech startups all around various European countries. Most don't become unicorns, or get bought out by American giants. But that doesn't mean that people generally find them "icky".
Or did you only talk to 80+ year olds in some rural areas in Belarus?
Yeah, but that’s not so much cultural but rather the US capital markets are fueled by foreign demand of USD.
The same inflated capital markets with mid-level investors with few pocket existed in every historical financial hegemony, like the British and the Dutch before then.
Now, if I look at the evolution of tech, nowadays there is so much already possible with open source solutions (think 2000s - did you have an open source office solution? communication platforms? mobile os? etc.) that I think developing new solutions not relying on American companies will be orders of magnitude easier. Will it be efficient economically? Probably not. But if it is required it will work.
4% of the world population, 25% of GDP, 65% of the equity valuation.
That's probably not sustainable over the long term, but that's the way it is now.
And the Bretton Woods system is basically a side effect of the fact that Europe had World War 2 and the USA didn't.
People probably don't know how little Google for example builds in-house with everything from Analytics to Gmail being of European origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
If Europe had a healthier corporate culture, European startups wouldn't keep being hoovered up by American tech giants. Selling like that is a vote of no confidence against the European ecosystem.
It's not the culture, it's the lack of capital markets. Each EU country has it's own market and none of them can compete with the US markets.
The really depressing part of this is that a large part of the capital funding these companies is European savers/organisations and governments.
If you need to pay 10% of your company to get your next round (EU) versus less than 5% (US) (numbers totally made up) then clearly you'll go for the US money and the US markets, which compounds the problem.
What this means is that it's harder and harder to create new hard tech (e.g. OSes, computers, phones ...) that is compatible with what's existing now.
Let's make a thinking experiment : Imagine that somehow an european company is magically releasing the most perfect phone you would ever imagine but it's not running an american OS ?
No app ecosystem, no possibility to bootstrap it. You can't connect to your friends that are using closed IM apps. You can't access this Google doc "file" someone just sent you without using Google suite...
And that's because we lost the war for standards. File standards, protocol standards. This ship has sail a long time ago.
And the issue is not only for this magical theorical european company.
Americans are also deluding themselves if they think this situation is good for them, this issue isn't unique to Europe, it would be the same for any american company trying to compete with Google or Apple. Except it would be even worse because they could be easily bought by existent actors if they managed to succeed.
In fact, everyone would gain form breaking tech giants, europeans, for sure, but especially americans.
This isn't a perfect analogy but: It's similar to how not wanting to be colonized doesn't imply that a nation themselves wants to be a colonial power.
One of the biggest problems with the European business environment is that it's primarily set up to cater to big European tech companies, largely at the cost of smothering smaller companies.
Problem is most of these companies are so old they date back to the industrial revolution, making a company like IBM look like a spry startup by comparison. This includes old dragons like Siemens, Ericsson, ABB, Bosch. SAP is perhaps the odd one out, being only 53 years old.
Breaking up a company means a subset is being separated from the parent company, in a way where the parent company is no longer deriving value from the (former) subsidiary.
In that context, why would Apple say "sure we will sever part of our business to be fully independent" rather than "ok we will no longer operate in Europe"? They lose the business either way, but the first scenario sets a bad precedent for them and encourages other countries/leagues/unions to try the same.
It also ignores the reality of the prisoners dilemma, in that a service can be bad for society over all but within that society it is better to use it than to not. Everyone driving around huge cars is a clear example of this. When a scenario like this is identified the correct thing to do is regulate it with law.
Also big companies are easiest to regulate and all the countries regulate them all the time. If you have 100 different TikToks, they threaten democracy even more as the profit incentive push towards extremism in any case.
Frankly, your call to 'critical mass' reminds me of sjw and leftist propaganda.
The same should be true of democracy, but unfortunately, in representative democracy, you only need to convince a few representatives, which does not actually require a critical mass of people agreeing.
Boycotts are the one democratic practice that hits a company's bottom line. Just ask Target.
And meanwhile, at least one Danish ministry has decided to drop Microsoft Office, and more are likely to follow if that goes well.
So, there is some movement to the right direction, but big changes take a long time...
There is a general need for taxation on wealth rather than labor in western societies. Its silly to single out big tech companies, which are actually an example of capitalism and free markets doing good: creating and rewarding the best products.
Looking at the richest Europeans [0], they all seem to be bourgeois.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Europeans_by_net_worth
the problem is US tech dominance.
So Europe sees a need to break that sooner or Later.
So yes, the list of companies to rein in has as many companies as they need to affect the security and economic changes the Europeans would like to see.
I would say we (the US) should negotiate with them, but considering the negotiating prowess of the current admin, maybe now is not the right time for that?
You want the European Parliament and every European country to have direct access to everything you type and say? Because that’s where this ends.
Apple, the company that truly wants to control everything, isn't even mentioned
Social media big tech is where everyone communicates which is a much bigger and much more damaging problem. Literally some people only communicate via one vendor with no interoperability.
Doesn't iMessage fit this bill to a tee? (Where the vendor in question also locks you into the hardware, not just the software?)
> if Apple went bust that would be bad for apple users
which happens to be 60% of the USA
> Google went bust the world would temporarily stop.
That's extreme hyperbole. Users would switch off gmail/gdocs/maps and be done.
A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?
Of course you haven't heard of some of them because you're in the US, which is still struggling with the concept of instant bank payments, paid leave, and non-lethal health care. And the gloriously unbureaucratic IRS still expects some communications to arrive by fax.
- Initial claim: "Europe doesn't have tech companies"
- Rebuttal listing a bunch
- "No, but look at market cap or number of jobs, it's not the same!"
Which is it, does Europe not have tech companies, or are they just smaller than the US? Because if it's the later, that's trivial to explain why - Europe is a continent where the biggest countries have less than 1/5 the population of the US. A tech company in France (e.g. Doctolib) has a significant curve to serve customers in other European countries - translation, different laws and regulations, sometimes currency, different market expectations. It's really really not comparable, and I wish more Americans have the basic logical capacity to realise that.
I'm not opposed to more robust growth, but not at the cost of becoming America. Of course, the slower growth was caused in great part by wars and the mass killing and/or expulsion of a significant portion of the population, while America prospered thanks to mass immigration. These things are changing.
That's not to say that an elaborate bureaucracy isn't built into Europe's DNA. After all, this is a continent that was largely shaped and governed by the Catholic church for a long, long time. At least in some respects, the European civilisation is more similar to the Chinese civilisation than to the American one.
It is not given that regulation leads to worse outcomes. For example, healthcare is regulated in most Western European countries, but we have better healthcare at lower cost (emphasizing the latter part, because people often come in with some story that the US is subsidizing Europe).
Besides that we have a lot more protection against big tech through better privacy laws. Enforcement has not been perfect yet, but we see a lot of day-to-day improvements (like in Europe you can use Facebook without ad tracking, currently it's paid, but the EU found that not to be legal).
I think one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of tech companies make a lot of money by externalizing cost and exploiting societies. Like Uber took the market by ignoring local labor laws. Meal delivery companies replaced regular wage (with benefits) workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now). Closed AI companies are taking all the creative work by millions of people to make their money-generating models without giving anything back. Amazon operated at cut-throat margins to destroy local (mom and pop) shops and raised prices once pretty much all competition was destroyed. Klarna earns money by preying on people who do not have the money to buy something, but are algorithmically tricked into buying stuff they probably don't need.
A subset of tech is just transferring monetary/cultural/etc. wealth from society to a small group of billionaires and it's ripping apart society.
Note that, at least for France, it was not found to be illegal to use contract workers; rather the jobs-as-they-existed were really employment contracts according to the reality of the arrangement and not procurement contracts; merely not calling them "employment contract" does not absolve the parties of the obligation of a work contract.
I'm not sure where this notion comes from. First, Europe does build its own tech companies — Bolt, Bol, SoundCloud, and Spotify, which started in Sweden. Second, do we really consider companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Twitter as pure progress?
I think the case is that the US has been really good at promoting its domestic products. Another reason why the US has more tech companies, and why more companies move to the US, is the lack of legislation for worker protection. However, this is the same argument as to why most products are manufactured in China.
> GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant
First, this is clearly not true [1]. Second, GDP per capita is a poor metric for assessing wealth and quality of life [2].
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?.... [2]: https://time.com/5118026/gdp-metric-success-wealth/
> I'm not sure where this notion comes from.
From the outside the EU sounds like on large unit. Where in facts it is a fragmented group. The EU has plenty of tech companies but it is pretty competitive when you have that many countries to cater to, each with their own culture, language, and laws. So you will target a specific market - like France, with marketing in french, adapted to the French context. Expanding to anew place is expensive and difficult. So you end up with lots of local, small/medium size businesses instead of one unified large business.
Just my personal opinion living here. And not saying it’s bad, it’s just a different dynamic
> European cultural hostility to business
Is that the real issue? I thought it was that trying to compete in such a stacked market, against the incumbent Usual Suspects who are gorged on "R&D investment" packages makes SF VC look a cakewalk so you just move to the US instead.
I don't think anyone believes that European-based BigTech monopolies would be particularly more beneficial than the current US-based ones. Pretty much the whole point is not to facilitate massive tech monopolies in the first place (and to break them up whenever they do emerge, a la the US breakup of Ma Bell)
I'm singling out that state because that's where most of the software innovation comes from and it's GDP is a bit of an outlier. Outside of California, the US is a bit of a mixed bag of states that is actually not that dissimilar to much of western Europe for things like growth, prosperity, and indeed GDP/capita. Some states like Texas have natural resources (and a relaxed attitude towards planetary destruction) that explains much of its economics.
Most of the wealth in the US is concentrated in a relatively small number of states where it is concentrated with small groups of people (the rest isn't that wealthy). If you take Germany and compare it to each of the states in the US, it probably comes out on top of many of them for metrics as GDP per capita, happiness, innovation, etc. Sure, it's maybe not a power house like California when it comes to software. But it's not like most of the US is doing that well on that front.
And if you start looking at healthcare, the alarmingly large prison population, and general levels of misery among the population, it's really not that amazing of a place any more. You might have more dollars. But they are worth a lot more in Europe than they are in the US. The same money buys you a lot more goods, services, housing, and quality of life over here. There are a lot of things that are kind of broken in the US. And that has a lot to do with its policies.
And there's more to technology than just software. Tesla definitely buys German machines when they want the best. And a lot of those wind mills popping up on in coastal waters, made in Europe too. The US automotive sector kind of imploded in recent years. If it weren't for the import tariffs, there would be a lot more European and Chinese cars on the roads there. Machines to make chips come from ASML, which is based in the Netherlands. There's nano tech, nuclear fusion (several companies active in the EU breaking records), etc.
And the thing with software is that it's easily copied and imitated. A lot of what MS, Meta, and others do isn't exactly rocket science. Whatever moat the US has there, it isn't geographic.
US-style "supergrowth" of modern tech companies is arguably at the expense of public interest. If anything else, I'm glad the EU has the bureucracy in place to contain it.
Europe runs on real freedom of choice, not 5 nationwide chains that do everything. MNT runs out of someone's apartment in Berlin.