There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.
As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.
Cope much?
As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.
We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.
Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship.
Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those).
It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver.
And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.
I agree. But that's the long-term problem to fix. Getting into bar fights or rambling about how we are So Much More Moral and So Much Better than everyone else isn't going to make the EU more competitive.
It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
Telcos aren't going to be able to pivot this without paying for knowledgeable staff.
Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you).
So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this.
If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
Amazon's biggest superpower is their ability to convince customers that they need the scale, international coverage and breadth of features regardless of the reality of their needs. Being on $BigCloud is a signal many small companies are sending to show they keep in step with the times. The real needs could often be addressed in simpler, cheaper ways.
Your car doesn't do everything a road vehicle can do. Your software doesn't do everything a software could do. Why would your cloud provider need to offer everything a cloud can offer? It's that "nobody got fired for choosing AWS" even if any future move is a prohibitively expensive redesign of everything.
Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument.
Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.
I said, "Unicorns are a problem and should not exist." I suspect that regulation that protects competition and the free market is a pretty effective way of preventing Unicorns from arising in the first place.
In my mind, regulations preventing unicorns (I.e statups > 1B in valuation) would require restricting personal decisions on where to invest money based on size. Protecting competition or free markets IMO would not succeed in preventing unicorns but maybe there is a plan that could work.
Because your sarcasm was constructive, maybe?
> my implicit argument is that
Next time, maybe consider making it explicit and without using sarcasm.
My explicit answer was that if you consider that regulations are fundamentally against freedom, then I disagree. To me, it's perfectly fine to regulate unicorns if we believe it is better for the society. You can disagree with the fact that it would be better for society, but that's not what you said. What you said is that regulating against unicorns would be against freedom.
There are a lot of links in that chain that strong pro-competition regulation could break.
People need a trillion-dollar company for even simpler tasks like exchanging messages with their friends and families.
Why? Because the UX and reliability of that option is superior to anything else. Which of course means Billions of users flock to that service. Which brings insane revenue and economies of scale. Which can be invested into improving the UX and reliability further than the competitors. Now the company has a big moat around its business and a Trillion dollar valuation.
Just because you consider ONE product from a large company good, doesn't make every single big tech product the same. Meta is from a completely different sector from the one I was talking about, and its other two money-making main products are riddled with tracking and dark-patterns.
My point stands: nobody needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website.