<story><title>EU to unveil landmark law curbing power of tech giants</title><url>https://www.dw.com/en/eu-to-unveil-landmark-law-curbing-power-of-tech-giants/a-55939862</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martindbp</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve come to realize this: free markets of winner-take-all products are a losing game for Europe. We&amp;#x27;re too late to the game, we can&amp;#x27;t compete with these huge companies, and there&amp;#x27;s no way to catch up in terms of venture capital. There are structural difficulties, namely that there are 50 very different countries on this continent with completely different languages and cultures. There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups.&lt;p&gt;As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won&amp;#x27;t be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of &amp;quot;fairness&amp;quot; of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>&amp;gt;we can&amp;#x27;t compete&lt;p&gt;the issue is even deeper. You can&amp;#x27;t compete without recreating the same issues that those giants already have in the US or China. I don&amp;#x27;t even &lt;i&gt;want to&lt;/i&gt; compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it&amp;#x27;d suck just as much.&lt;p&gt;I want smaller companies, which don&amp;#x27;t abuse data, which don&amp;#x27;t sacrifice security for &amp;#x27;hypergrowth&amp;#x27;, who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on. Companies like this will never compete with American or Chinese giants in a &amp;#x27;free market&amp;#x27;. It&amp;#x27;s like having a green energy company compete with companies that can legally pour their waste into the river.&lt;p&gt;The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. Don&amp;#x27;t copy &amp;quot;maximal consumer welfare&amp;quot; doctrines or prioritise convenience, promote decentralisation. It looks like there&amp;#x27;s some good stuff in these new laws, but they don&amp;#x27;t go far enough yet.</text></comment>
<story><title>EU to unveil landmark law curbing power of tech giants</title><url>https://www.dw.com/en/eu-to-unveil-landmark-law-curbing-power-of-tech-giants/a-55939862</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martindbp</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve come to realize this: free markets of winner-take-all products are a losing game for Europe. We&amp;#x27;re too late to the game, we can&amp;#x27;t compete with these huge companies, and there&amp;#x27;s no way to catch up in terms of venture capital. There are structural difficulties, namely that there are 50 very different countries on this continent with completely different languages and cultures. There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups.&lt;p&gt;As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won&amp;#x27;t be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of &amp;quot;fairness&amp;quot; of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xxpor</author><text>That seems awfully defeatist. Spotify is winning in music, for example. And that&amp;#x27;s certainly a case where the different languages make a big difference.&lt;p&gt;European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that&amp;#x27;s the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn&amp;#x27;t foster risk taking.</text></comment>