[pgeorgi]

The US business model has established "free" for services on the net, paid for by others using behavioral data for advertising. That has its advantages (access for all, no matter the socioeconomic background!) but no "paid for by others" scheme that is less intrusive has popped up yet and "free" is very hard to compete with.

There's also less of a culture of "pour billions into tons of startups and see what sticks", which is a market distortion of its own. That aspect is drying up in the US though, thankfully.

[kergonath]

> paid for by others using behavioral data for advertising

And some generous VC funding sloshing around in the Silicon Valley, and the associated global brain drain. This is proving to get harder to reproduce elsewhere.

[autoexec]

Europeans can use ad supported models without resorting to surveillance capitalism. They can even use targeted advertising without it. You don't need to have people's entire internet history, a full list of their past sexual partners, and their GPS coordinates to push ads relevant to a person's interests. The spying is entirely unnecessary, and there's a history going back long before the internet even existed proving that ads without the spying are effective.

Privacy laws don't prevent Europeans from offering ad based services on the net, and being limited to providing more privacy friendly services will make those services more attractive to consumers outside of the EU as well. There's a lot of opportunity created when you can't simply fall back on the most exploitative practices the US allows for.