They can fine them or forbid them to do business until it happens.
Big tech does a lot of revenue there, i’m sure they wont abandon europe just because of this.
See the Apple USB-C case.
See the Apple USB-C case.
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.
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.