I'm from the US originally and emigrated about 10 years ago; I think you're conflating different aspects of technology. The boom of US tech isn't superior infrastructure, it's that tech is a very lucrative investment vehicle so it gets a ton of attention. (Well, it was anyways, not sure what 2023 is going to do to this)
While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional. It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more costly for end users.
Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US cities.
This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good; far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main difference between the tech you read about in US that gets millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles on like any other business is simply the high attention from investors looking for investment vehicles.
Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and the EU version is often even a bit cheaper.
The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having any real control or input over the way that money is spent by Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's been fully legalized and approved.
I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as little as possible while still technically qualifying for the subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare minimum requirements are met.
Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech companies get as always being great innovation; investors want a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's something that has a way of providing good returns on investments, including short term fads.
Some tech giants of the US are legitimate technology giants, others are just land grabbers that do something simple at scale(i.e. sharing status updates with peers).
EU lacks on the second one, also its the one that has all the controversy.
Yet, I wouldn't downplay the USA's hard tech capabilities and talent pool. IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record.
EU is the old neighbourhood that once had all the cool new stuff but now is focused on preserving what they accumulated, life is good there but not much is happening. The USA is the newly built neighbourhood that got hip and trendy and has all the new cool stuff. China is this neighbourhood that once was great, lost its lure but lately it is up and coming with some of the coolest new stuff being there.
If my post is so full of ignorance it should be easy for you to formulate an argument against it, like I did against your comment. Yet, you seemingly can't.
Europe has been far better at adopting technology than the US has. Everything from Internet connection speeds and traffic prices to digital payments and identification. Europe has many successful technology companies and technologies, why they don't grow into the next big company is in part because they get acquired by US companies with offshore funds. The growth of silicon valley in the first place wasn't exactly a demonstration in free market capitalism if that's what you're claiming.
Edit: Of course none of this matters since your original comment gathered so many responses that the article got caught in the flame war filter (more comment than points over 40 points).
This article feels very specific to Europe. I think the US does a really good job of funding tech innovation, especially given its size and how complex it operates.
Not debating that it would be good to see more tech start-ups succeed in Europe. But there are a couple clear differences between Europe and the US.
1. Europe is more linguistically fragmented than the US. For example, the EU has 24 official languages while the US effectively has two. Because of this, in Europe network effects and economies of scale are more difficult to achieve with products that could compete with YouTube, Instagram, and so on. Instead, many European products that are popular are those that don't rely on network effects: cars, appliances, clothing, and food. Meanwhile, because of its more cohesive market, the US has seen higher returns to investment in movies, music, and social networks. Thanks to having more resources, many of those products become enormously successful domestically and end up being exported.
2. The stock market generally plays a smaller role in financing companies in Europe than in the US. For example, the Czech JetBrains is not traded in the stock market at all, and the Swedish Spotify's debt-to-equity ratio is 47% while Meta's is 8%.[1] Two companies with equal future EBITDA streams have different valuations for their stocks if one of them is primarily debt financed and the other is primarily financed through the stock market.
Both China and Russia eschewed US tech and they have much, much healthier tech industries than Europe.
The US also doesn't really believe in foreign competition ("Buy American", recent huge industrial subsidies as part of the IRA), so I don't really know if Europe should kowtow to the US here. If the US gave up on the CLOUD act none of this would be a problem anyway.
Problem is that EU is not comparable in any manner to the US. For one, where do you suggest the Silicon Valley of EU is? London would've been a decent bet except that they just bailed.
As someone else mentioned, capital is way harder to raise (meaning slower to market) - and then an underrated factor which is equally important is how easy or difficult is it to sell as a nascent startup. At least in my industry (cybersecurity) it has been very hard in the EU vs US in the earlier stages of product maturity.
Much like the parent comment, I don't see this changing anytime soon and I'm fully betting on the fact US will keep their dominance in tech.
There are a couple things missing from this article that really need to be fleshed out:
1. You're comparing the unicorns which is like comparing the top of the pyramid without measuring the base. In other words, where are the figures for seed-round startups? What is the amount of capital available to startups at the different stages in the business life cycle? Without those numbers we can't really tell if this is a matter of investors in the EU being less efficient in their investments or if its simply a matter of scale.
2. The other mistake that people I think when making this comparison is in comparing the success of the US market compared to Europe as a whole. First of all, you have to keep in mind that much of the success in the tech sector is highly localized. Now obviously the definition of 'tech sector' can vary wildly but generally when we talk about The Tech Sector we mean Silicon Valley. Almost every other state not named California has tried to replicate Silicon Valley and met with the same lack of success you're speaking about here. The major two exceptions are New York and Texas in that order. The rest of the American States see the same kind of out migration of tech chasing money that the essay sees among foreign tech entrepreneurs.
3. Expanding on the above: on a national level we don't care if the tech sector concentrates in California or Texas or wherever as long as it is in the US. The EU might refer to itself as a union, but are the French willing to invest in a tech sector centralized in Romania for the benefit of a Europe as a whole? Not likely. Silicon Valley, as much as we celebrate the free market aspect of it's success, also benefited from massive federal government spending in that region that played a huge rule in establishing its tech ecosystem back in the 50s and 60s.
I think this has a lot more to do with the US having a larger english speaking population under one legal framework. All of the capital goes here first since it has the most upside and makes it easier to expand to other english speaking countries.
I'm Polish and would never build a tech business targeting the Polish market first over the US, and it has nothing to do with regulations getting in my way.
Building ChatGPT or Google for EU citizens is a lot harder than doing it for English speakers.
Also most of the leading figures in AI are from Europe or Asia but followed the money to the US.
EDIT 3: Americans underestimate the value of being surrounded by oceans instead of Russia and Germany, which they end up attributing to their ingenuity or libertarian leaning version of capitalism.
The difference in tech outcomes can definitely be attributed to _European_ conditions, but regulation is extremely country-specific – the _EU_ is not the detriment (e.g. Germany might be notably bureaucratic, but the culture in Sweden differs, and so do frameworks in Poland). EU institutions are out to get the US giants, but startups or scaleups? Out of sight.
There really is comparatively little reward for shooting for the moon though – the fragmented stock markets don't provide great exit opportunities, so less money goes into funding ambitious companies. Then, scaling throughout all of Europe is notably hard, with dozens of languages, cultures, and legal frameworks to navigate. Some of these cultures are more risk-averse, and that's not easy to change. Not to mention English being the _lingua franca_ of business and tech.
I would love Europe to reach the States' level of tech strength, but these are all really hard problems.
With all due respect, America doesn't seem any better in regards to technology than Europe. For example the European commission are rewriting the Data Protection Act which seems like a great sign.
"...the US produces more innovation, some of it beneficial. There is no European Google, Tesla or Facebook."
But what about infrastructure? Roads, public transport,health insurance - or better health industry, pensions?
This is such a weird take. The global high tech economy is tightly intertwined. The EU is an integral part of that, and in many areas is doing perfectly fine. Further European policymakers have for the last two decades done an overal excellent job integrating eastern Europe into the Western economic model. Of course first credit belongs to the states themselves, but the border between Germany and Poland used to be one of the largest GDP per Capita drops in the world. Now the difference is marginal. This has happened inside one generation. To accuse them of legislating only for already prosperous societies bears no resemblance to reality.
The Internet and digitalization revolution enabled a few US companies to capture vast amounts of value worldwide simply by being first by having access to the first emerging market for the new tech (and being ruthlessly business savvy). The US being rich and an optimistic consumption culture made that happen. Some of that windfall has been redirected to fun things like boosting Rocket tech, or useful things like boosting EV tech.
Speaking of the latter, I remember a few years ago a lot of people on here were claiming that the US and specifically Tesla had an unassailable lead in Battery Tech. That didn't exactly last long, did it?
But the idea that the US is uniquely poised to dominate the tech landscape for the next decades is silly, doubly so based on some relatively niche tech like rockets. As a European I am worried about the strategic tech competition with China, not the US. And I am worried that the EU is not doing enough to tax the profits being generated here, (cough, Ireland, Luxembourg...).
... and btw, it's all built on Linux, which was given away for free by some European guy.
First, let me make it clear that I am totally on your page regarding the distaste for nationalistic and protectonist policies and do think that in the long term costs will almost always outweigh the benefits.
Nevertheless, I want to point out that there seem to be two large real-world counter-examples to your argument: Russia and China. Both have made live difficult (or impossible) for US tech companies and both now have successful homegrown alternatives (Yandex and Baidu to Google, YK and Sina Weibo to Facebook/Twitter) -- even though I would argue both countries are not exactly known for their Silicon-Valley-style startup culture.
The problem with many Internet businesses is that they are natural monopolies or "winner takes all" markets where it is very hard to compete against an entrenched incumbent. This is definitely true for social networking (because of the network effects that you need to be on the platform your friends are on) and I believe today also for Internet search (because of the enormous fixed cost of developing a competitive search algorithm and index and the very low marginal cost of each search query).
And I think this is where Europe's different startup culture really comes to bite: I strongly believe that EU companies are from a technical point of view just as capable of innovating as US companies. But they are more careful, less financed and also have much smaller home markets, all of which contribute to the fact that they are much slower at getting products to market. And in a "winner takes all" market, being slower means getting nowhere.
So, yes, I would say that the existence of these large US companies is one reason for a lack of large software companies in the EU. But (pre-Trump, at least) this is the beauty of international trade, no? You don't have to be good at everything. The US is good at producing world-class Internet companies (due to its startup culture focused on speed) while Europe is good at producing e.g. high-tech machinery (where probably being careful is more important than being fast). And there is nothing wrong with that - we use Google and Facebook and in turn the US buys our machines and in the end we are both better off than by having to duplicate each others' efforts ourselves (regardless of how good or bad we were at making clones).
It's not like having fewer regulations in tech would be an instant panacea. The bigger reasons for US dominance are the larger capital and consumer market - both still fragmented in the EU. Add on top of that a more flexible labour market in the US (someone from California is more likely to work in New York than someone from Lithuania to work in Portugal). Regulations do matter but there's so many other things that make it harder in Europe.
> Between, say, the American way of embarrassing riches and the EU way of equality I note one didn't produce many tech companies.
This is a great point that is often ignored. People like to claim that X or Y EU nation is better governed than the US or enjoys greater happiness. However they are also beneficiaries of all the innovation that has come out of America for them to have those standards of living - things like the smartphones and the Internet in recent times.
While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional. It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more costly for end users.
Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US cities.
This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good; far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main difference between the tech you read about in US that gets millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles on like any other business is simply the high attention from investors looking for investment vehicles.
Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and the EU version is often even a bit cheaper.
The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having any real control or input over the way that money is spent by Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's been fully legalized and approved.
I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as little as possible while still technically qualifying for the subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare minimum requirements are met.
Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech companies get as always being great innovation; investors want a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's something that has a way of providing good returns on investments, including short term fads.
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