European tech CEOs urge 'Europe-first' mentality to counter U.S. dominance after Trump victory
European tech CEOs urge 'Europe-first' mentality to counter U.S. dominance after Trump victory
Tech CEOs in Europe are urging the region to take bolder actions to tackle Big Tech's dominance and counter reliance on the U.S. after Donald Trump's presidential election win.
- CEOs of European technology companies told CNBC at the Web Summit technology conference this week that the continent should adopt a “Europe-first” approach to tech, after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory.
- Andy Yen, CEO of VPN maker Proton, said Europe should “step up” and “be aggressive” to counter U.S. Big Tech firms’ tight grip on many important technologies, such as web browsing, cloud computing, smartphones — and now artificial intelligence.
- Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Lithuania-based used clothing app Vinted, urged Europe to take the “right choices” to ensure it doesn’t get “left behind.”
If there's a way for that to happen without just building equality abusive and exploitative mega corporations of similarly monopolistic scale, that seems like a very good thing.
Though I honestly kinda worry the only way to really compete with the US would be for Europe to make choices that are similarly shitty as all the ones we've made here in the states :/
We need to push for open source software, contribute existing FOSS projects, and focus on open standards and interoperability - that way companies know if they don't play fair people/governments can move to other suppliers more easily.
Properly punishing US tech companies for their shenanigans would help too.
If you are an EU-citizen support the petition for an EU-Linux.
Properly punishing US tech companies for their shenanigans would help too.
Proper antitrust enforcement would help literally everybody except the very wealthy - which is why they pour so many resources into preventing it. If you want to change things, support any politicians, policies, or public officials which take antitrust action (basically anybody who does what Lina Kahn has been doing for the past 4 years).
In quality of life, especially if you add equality and time-off variable’s we’re not lagging behind the US, we’re squarely beating them.
But in the neoliberal GDP growth rates, which is the only thing capitalists seem to care about, yes we’re lagging behind.
If there's a way for that to happen without just building equality abusive and exploitative mega corporations of similarly monopolistic scale, that seems like a very good thing.
These companies invented the important stuff before becoming abusive and exploitative mega corporations, so it should be possible in theory.
Best our politicians can do is to give our money to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to store all our data in the US.
If you don't like it you can let them know through any of Meta's social networks or X.
Vote for different people (Pirate Party for example), sign petitions like EU-Linux, use Linux and opensource yourself, and talk to your friends and family about it. Nothing will change if we do nothing.
Tbh if its done the right way i 100% support this. I think europe should do this with other markets too. Remain open to trade but dont be reliant on it. Also the european space program should step up.
Nah, we don’t need that stupid nationalism that usa has enacted and destroyed that country
As long as it doesn't devolve into some form of regressive nationalism (or in this case infranationalism).
I guess the rest of the world better come up with a plan to deal with a Trump dominated US. Every single day it seems to be getting worse and he's not even in charge as yet.
America can lecture us on how we respond to a dangerous hegemony, but first it better put a few safety pins back into its own machinery. Europe has first hand experience with strong men with a mission. Just building a passive Maginot Line didn't seem to work last time.
Proton
Random Lithuanian clothing app
Lolwtf
Exactly illustrates where Europe’s tech sector is at. It only has a few tech companies, that were founded in the post dotcom bubble era, that people outside Europe would know. If you’d ask an average American to name a European tech company they probably will name an old German company like Mercedes or if they follow financial news ASML or Nokia or something but nothing that has been founded in the last 20 years. They probably don’t even know that Spotify is from Europe. Europe failed to build titans of industry of the 21st century.
If you’d ask an average American to name a European tech company
You're probably right for the typical American, but I could do Skype (Estonia), Spotify (Sweden), and SAP (Germany).
Many business-to-consumer tech companies -- like, online services and such -- have relatively high fixed costs and low variable costs. That is, you pay about the same to develop software whether you have one customer or a billion customers, and the cost of adding servers to add capacity for more customers isn't all that high.
But your revenue grows linearly with the number of customers that you have.
As a result, it is really, really bad to be small if you are in that category. So it is very important to scale up quickly, so that you get as far away from that "one customer" area as quickly as possible. Lose money while you're small, okay, but become large as soon as possible.
It's easier to scale if there are few barriers to expansion.
My bet is that the major issue here is that compared to the US internal market, the EU's internal market is relatively-fragmented. There are different languages -- yeah, there are some interchange languages, but not everyone can speak them and certainly not everyone prefers them. There are greater legal differences among member states. I would give good odds that there are larger cultural preference differences, which will affect things like branding. So for a B2C company trying to rapidly expand from Finland to Germany and Greece and Ireland and Spain, you've got a lot of hurdles that a similar company trying to expand from California to Texas and New York and Virginia and Florida don't face. And that tends to keep them small longer, which is really bad for companies with that high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost structure. If you're an investor, safer to invest in a US company that will probably grow and get big easily. Of course, you could start an Estonian company and then grow in something like the US market...but then you have to deal with the complexities of spanning markets from the get-go. I'd expect that the barriers there are substantial, or you'd expect to see things like companies starting up in, say, Uruguay and then growing in the US domestic market, and we don't see that.
There are tech companies that originated in the EU. But it's rare for them to be the big business-to-consumer sort. So I don't think the issue is -- for example -- excessive regulation or some other things I've seen blamed (I mean, it might not help, but I don't think that that's the dominant factor). That should affect all tech companies, not just the big business-to-consumer variety. I think that market fragmentation is the big factor here.
Brussels is working on some of that, like legal differences across member states. Some will just naturally tend to smooth out. But some are just not going to go away in the near future; French consumers are probably going to want stuff in French, for example, and Italians in Italian.
There was some recent report I remember seeing from Mario Draghi floating around on either here or [email protected] that spent some time talking about market fragmentation as an issue for competitiveness.
EDIT: Oh, and OnlyFans (UK).
Lol sure, try getting Microsoft's fingers out of europe's pie first
Sanctions. we need sanctions against US
Drop the dollar.
Good luck with that. How many times have we tried? Like almost every country in the EU tried to create the Silicon Valley of Europe and non of them are truly successful. Most Europeans just lack a Pan European attitude. Like every country rather wants to do it on their own and create a tech center in their own country and most Europeans are not willing to move abroad for work. In order for Europe to create a tech sector that can compete with the US and China it needs all of Europe’s brightest minds concentrated in one area competing with each other. Like how it is in the Bay Area or Shenzen. Sure there are jobs that can be done remotely but a lot of innovation happens in the lab or on the shop floor.
Europe just lacks the advantage the US and China have. A large single market that speaks the same language, is culturally pretty much the same and has cheap shipping. Like every European country has their own Amazon knock off that is only used within its borders because they failed to expand in Europe mostly due to the language and culture barrier and expensive international shipping. And now Amazon and AliExpress have swooped in and these local companies can’t really compete and have zero chance to grow internationally now.
Huh, I didn't know the heroin dealer from Pulp Fiction was a tech CEO
So when the EU says Europe first it's totally okay, but if the United States says America first it's totally toxic? Seems a bit two-faced to me.
Ftr,
- The EU didn't say anything. Two random European CEOs said something.
- This would be reactive.
Ugh, more balkanization, protectionism and jingoism.
It's a bad idea for the US. It's also a bad idea for everyone else.
How is that 'protectionism' if you develop your own technology to gain independence? As someone already wrote in this thread, Europe can support Open Source projects, decentralization. That's good for everyone.
Don't get me wrong, everybody should be trying to manufacture some microchips inside their own borders - access to microchips is a national security concern for every country.
How is that 'protectionism' if you develop your own technology to gain independence?
Any actions taken to promote domestic industry over foreign is protectionism, by definition. If a government encourages the growth of domestic producers via tax incentives, grants, tariffs, etc (anything that adjusts the balance really) that is literally protectionism.