This is a gross, unjustified generalization. Sure, there's a lot of old crap around, but that's no different from other parts of the world; but there's also lots of new, modern stuff, with a huge diversity across the continent.

Just to give a common counterexample, the SEPA system allows me to trivially transmit money to anyone in the eurozone, for a considerable portion of them (including everyone in my country) in seconds, completely free of charge and involvement of any third party except my and their bank. Cash App, Venmo and comparable services basically don't exist in the EU, because the governments stimulated and mandated large scale interoperable digital infrastructure.

Thinking this black and white can't apply consistently to an organization as big as the EU. The problems you listed are indeed bad and need solving. But they can do good every once in a while too.

And I'm mainly an Eurosceptic outside of tech issues mind you.

Vast question, and apart the geopolitical reasons, I could not say why we are unable to develop in specific sectors such as IT. I could not speak about whole Europe, but France, my country has serious issues with transforming a tech success into an economic success. If you take this Minitel story for example : the US would have made it a worlwide success 15 years before Internet emerged with hundred of billions of profits. In France it was distributed almost freely to families by the state owned phone company. So it became a booster to the national economy but not much more than that. It never became a standard, never went out of France and never allowed us to become an early IT champion... We simply have different mindsets. But I think that other European countries are far better than us in this domain.

> While in France you have judges ordering (shamelessly, in my view) that Google both has to do a certain job and pay for the privilege of doing it.

Again this is geopolitics. In France Google is perceived as a dangerous company for our European interest. MOreover like other US tech companies, they cheat to avoid their tax duty in France, which infuriates many people. So all the actions intended against Google are part of a dirty war. These actions are undoubtly unfair. But do not forget Google actively lobbies against our governements at the EU level, try to prevent us from passing laws to regulate our data privacy issues, help the US agencies to spy on us... They are not our friends.

After watching that recent video by TechAltar where he speaks about the EU not having a lot of tech companies, I was feeling a bit low. But your point actually makes sense, and makes me think that perhaps it's for the best since the EU will actually have the political means to reign in big tech. companies - basically the big oil of this age.

>I wish Germany, France and the rest of EU would just push for more regulations and taxation of foreign digital companies

See, this is the problem. You're looking at the big EU countries and stopping there. Smaller EU countries in many ways feel the same about larger EU countries. Foreign banks basically took over the banking sectors of former Soviet states and then you got things like the Danske Bank money laundering case. When Bulgarian truck drivers tried to use their competitive advantage of lower average incomes, rules were drafted to bar them from it. On top of all that brain drain is still ongoing. The EU as a whole is one of the most unequal economic zones in terms of income.

If those countries did things like you propose then there wouldn't be an EU or it would be significantly smaller.

>Great EU firewall

I know what the internet is like under the lead of the US. It's not amazing, but it's pretty good. I'm afraid that EU-net will be a far worse place judging by how regulated many things are in Germany or how if things are against French (and other western European) interests then EU-wide rules are drafted to stop that.

Large EU countries along with the EU work as a good counterbalance to the US when it comes to the internet. But I fear that if you remove the US from the equation then you end to with something worse.

As a European it sure doesn't seem to be that way. I'm using Windows, Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, ycombinator, Reddit etc. Very little European stuff in sight, despite the fact that the EU has a much higher population than the US.

This kind of extra regulation is one of the reasons why Europe is so much weaker in digital technology. It's not the only piece either.

Was the EU ever really in the race to begin with? They really wanted to be, but you can't actually centrally plan a working software or hardware economy.

> EU leaders will put speedbumps in place

That's the only tool they understand how to use. It's sad that this makes them feel they have to constantly use it.

> knowing the governments have their back regardless.

Yea.. you almost get the feeling these policies are _designed_ to create monopolies and have nothing at all to do with fostering competition.

The results say otherwise. One way or another Europe killed off its tech companies and it's now entirely reliant on foreign companies for almost all IT services.

It's not a trope because they've already succeeded. You can't look at the EU where almost every IT service they use is made by a foreign company and say call it flourishing.

>But to my mind, unregulated everything is a nightmare.

Everything, like making food for your kids? Breathing air?

What tech is the EU missing out on?

All the recent "tech" I see from the US is all about novel ways to screw & exploit people for profit, at the expense of turning society into a dangerous wasteland full of outrage and saturated by advertising.

No thanks.

Which would be gov competition which in the current status quo of EU governance is a big nono. The US cares a bit less about that and it's companies got the clout, the money and keep buying out EU ones in new markets or existing ones. China obviously cares even less and will straight up do what you said.

What Europe needs is a lot of different changes, it needs to ramp up it's market unification and notably some protectionism to let it's local companies mature and prevent even mature ones from being Nokia'd or the like.

>Harmonize markets so you can just sell everywhere without having to fund the local civil servant union by filling the new-and-special-snowflake paperwork for every country you want to sell to.

That's something the EU is very slowly doing.

Examples? The only thing you might argue is privacy laws and there we could be thankful to the EU for being the only trading block that's made some (perhaps futile) effort to protect their civilians rights.

I broadly agree with the spirit of this line. But I fail to see how Europe is achieving that. Can you share a few specific (and meaningful) examples of how European approach has created an outcome which works better for its citizens and members?

So far from what I have seen, European companies (eg. Spotify) seem to have a similar modus operandi as their US counterparts. Many European countries are still in NATO and hence would collaborate with the US government for security purposes when push comes to shove. And the key regulatory initiatives either haven't proven effective in curbing US giants' powers (eg. GDPR) or have pretty strong counter-arguments rooted in principles (eg. Right to be forgotten vs freedom of speech).

Are we sure about that? GDPR seems like a gift to European startups who don’t like American competition. BlaBlah car in France got huge, incidentally right around the time the anti-Uber hysteria in France reaches a peak. The sale of Daily Motion to Yahoo was blocked by the French government under ridiculous national economic interest grounds. Europe loves tariffs and trade barriers and they have a history of “protecting” the public from competition. Try shipping spare parts for a child’s stroller to France — I was taxed at 50% — the tax even applying to the shipping fee, not just the parts. My dad made the mistake of sending kids clothes to my kids with the tags still on them — $100 worth of clothes cost me €65 in duties. When I ship small amounts of stuff to the US, I literally have never had to pay a tax. The EU loves protectionism. Farmers literally set fires and throw rocks when Spanish wine crosses into France and the authorities don’t prosecute a single person. Now that EU countries have a bunch of lotteries tickets with American tech companies, the governments are likely foaming at the mouth with excitement over fining American companies. And, sadly, many people in Europe actually think this is about privacy.

Honestly, my biggest complaints with EU software legislation are:

1. It doesn't scale down to tiny non-commercial or barely-commercial activities.

2. It theoretically proposes penalties on private people outside the EU (even though they are rarely imposed?).

3. I have no vote or representation.

For example, I used to provide tiny, free web apps that performed useful tasks. These often had fewer than 100 users, and they kept no information that wasn't strictly necessary. But if you emailed me about them, I might not respond within a month, especially if I was traveling or something. The GDPR requires 30-day turnarounds for lots of stuff. I shut down all of these apps, because some of my users might have been in the EU? And I won't be releasing any more free web tools. It's all CLI now.

Similarly, I host a small web forum in the US, and we have some EU users. We keep no information beyond that required to run a web forum. If you ask the moderators to delete all your posts on August 1st, well, I hope someone took their computer on vacation.

Similarly, I maintain a couple of open source projects. Many of these are paid for by an employer, who makes the code available for free. In the past, I have occasionally added a feature to one of my projects as a consulting project for someone. But reading through https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-eus-product-liability-dire..., I see that I am now likely to have personal liability for my open source projects, towards people who have never paid me a cent. Sure, I do have liability towards the rare consulting customer who actually paid for something, which is carefully negotiated in our contract. But in the future, some random EU company I've never heard of will likely be able to use my software, pay me nothing, and make me liable? It's very hard to tell with current drafts.

And I have at least one open source AI tool on GitHub, that's of no use to anyone. But I suppose I'll need to read the EU AI laws now, too.

Sometimes I just want to build useful stuff (web apps, forums, open source tools) and give it away for free. But if I have any European users, I may get entangled in complex European laws. Honestly, there's zero upside for me supporting EU users, because I'm not benefiting from them, and I keep having to read hundreds of pages of incredibly vague laws in multiple languages.

If the Product Liability Directive goes through in its current form, and if GitHub offers me a way to block EU downloads, I'll probably use it. I am not interested in supporting or encouraging commerical EU users who have never paid me anything.

Because its almost impossible to compete? These companies have so many resources, its impossible for any local competitor to compete. Amazon can just crash the prices till the competition dies, Google can just not allow YouTube on it, Facebook will exist because of the network it has.

What the EU is doing is what is needed to happen long ago. These companies are not currently successful because they offer the best experience or the best innovativtion, they are successful because they crush anyone else.

For example WhatsApp has many many better alternatives, which have better features and better privacy, but it still the #1 because of the monopoly it has on communication.

What the EU did here is smart, they didn't outright ban WhatsApp, or funded a direct competitor. They forced them to play fair, to stop the monopolistic behavior and force them to compete on features, rather than succeeding only because my familly is on WhatsApp.

The same thing applies to Apple, which forces to everyone to use its crappy, intentionally handicapped browser engine.

And also forcing everyone to use its payment services while taking percentage of the profits and not even allowing you to increase the prices to cover their percentage!, this is absolutely outreagous and finally something is being done about it.

Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success.

We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives and if they would, the money would evaporate over night to companies with political connections and overpriced consultants who would just produce documentation.

Let's face it, the ship of EU dominance in tech has sailed a long time ago, we might as well get comfy with the US pulling the strings on that front.

The only way the EU would ever stand a chance is if the EU would pull a Chinese style great firewall and outright ban foreign tech companies on their internal market, leaving space for local companies to spring up and fill the void but that will never happen.

The EU recognizes the processing of personal data as a fundamental right.

That limits a certain kind of technological innovation, namely that which is in violation of that right.

> This decision, as I understand it, renders large swathes of tech service revenue models untenable.

Too bad for them, but so what? Now they can no longer label me and sell those labels of me to others, with no way of recourse to me if they get those labels wrong.

Complaining about this is a bit like Big Tobacco complaining they can no longer sell cigarettes to kids. Yeah, that's the point.

You’re optimism is great, tbh I am extremely cynical.

But name one Fortune 50 tech company making great profits giving high salaries to EU devs and R&D folks that isnt relying on Government Funding from EU except SAP & ASML.

Europe has far higher education outcomes for its young graduates, than both America and India. There is almost no student debt in most major EU countries.

Yet why is it that not just America, even India a significantly poorer country, with worse infrastructure, bad quality colleges which forces their brightest minds to come to EU, America and Australia to study in higher education.

And YET they do better than Europe when it comes to Tech ? Why ? It’s not just cheap labour, other places have even cheaper labour and more lax regulations.

I’m just saying the reality, I love your optimism, but I wish EU bureaucrats were actually that effective. GDPR just allows non-EU companies to grow big in their domestic markets and then they think about regulations more and enter the EU market. While EU companies have to think of laws from the beginning.

Security isn’t some black magic science which can be an intellectual secret, or give bleeding edge. It’s grunt work mostly, and gets postponed to invest in more profit generating parts of the business. If non-EU businesses think they are losing money due to lax security, they’ll flip the game, but this law doesnt do that, non-EU companies just first expand in their large domestic markets and then think about the rest later once they have more money to think of it.

Consumer will definitely win from CRA, just like they did with GDPR, USB-C just in the short term. It’ll just continue forcing EU pioneers to move to America to start their business.

I hope you are right and I am wrong, it would be great if a region like EU can prove that one can be great innovators while also being heavily regulated and pro-consumer in the long term.

It just hasn’t happened yet, and continues to go the opposite direction. Now ASML is threatening to move elsewhere too (albeit for different reason).

and yet all the scandals about breaking the privacy of users for profit or worse didn't come from EU.

Maybe they are not that wrong...