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.
It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
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.
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.