Monopoly laws are one thing, not being able to create new products is another. Sure Europe need not become a carbon copy of USA/China, but they need to ensure they can keep creating valuable products so their current way of life may sustain. I will encourage everyone to read the pdf as it highlights the concerns.
You can reach a $100B market cap simply by creating an amazing product that people all over the world want to use, no monopoly required. A prerequisite for this, of course, is an ecosystem that encourages and efficiently enables the creation of amazing products.
yeah but are they? it's not like there are five European search providers competing equally for the users. On the other hand, there's a bunch of quasi monopolies, e.g., Lufthansa on many routes in Germany after other airlines collapsed, or Datev for accounting (which interestingly you can't even buy but have to go through a tax advisor).
Why would that be an achievement? On contrary it should be seen as an achievement and enabler for competition that this is not the case. Ie. Monopolistic behavior.
I would rather we had the US situation where the market was dominated by new publicly traded companies, instead of companies, some of them not even publicly traded, all of which founded many decades, if not centuries ago.
It is actually one of our biggest issues that not only is the population physically old, but everything we do is done in such an old fashioned way.
As bad as Google and Facebook may be, they are publicly traded, transparent, their existence gives the US a very good geopolitical asset, their creation lifted a lot of people into out of the middle class into the upper class.
We really cannot say the same about any EU corporation.
That is up to a fair, well governed, market to decide that.
And before you say something along the lines of: "Well, the market want McDonalds food and snort themselves to death in cocaine" - let's just stop it there and think, in silence, about what a fair market is.
It would be an achievement as the EU is not an isolated planet. For the prosperity of EU it needs to compete in external markets. If EU has no big companies but US/China do EU will be less and less competitive in global markets. Certain things require big companies to be possible with efficiency (e.g you can't have Airbus as a collection of small companies and certainly would not have been competitive with Boeing).
Anyhow, you are right, and that is the infamous downwards spiral and lack of sovereignty to the market.
Either we see increased protectionism, increased inequality, or we pull our selves together and make a plain global playing field (eg. Through minimum taxation schemes).
Sadly Europe is not at a point where it can utilize increased protectionism to save itself. Europe has far too few natural resources and needs a far higher standard of living, necessitating importing a lot of stuff. Unless it can maintain technological edge in some products, Europe is doomed to lose it's current standard of living.
Maybe you know this already but I reckon rather not: Europe is not "one" state to apply all that things you mention. Europe is a loosely connected network of wildly diverging national and partisan interests, with resources very unevenly distributed, so I definitely cannot see an "European" solution - heck I cannot even expect one. So, nice chat, but not gonna happen - or at least not in this way.
It's not so direct though. There is a huge technological factor in it. France didn't have coal. It developed tremendous nuclear capacity. From trade perspective Finland was basically an island separated by impassable ice for some part of the year. Finland developed ice breakers. Europe developed communication satellites but USA wouldn't launch them as they competed with US satellites. So Europe developed Ariane launchers.
Europe has a huge technological base and has the capability to affect its own destiny.
It is an achievement because it shows that the market works: That new companies can be created and blossom and grow by their own merits to become large enterprises.
By contrast, the lack of competition in Europe holds down any newcomer. The only big companies today are those that have already be big companies for many years. That is not a natural state in a competitive market… normally new companies thrive and take market share while others decline and whither away.
The fact that Europe has no new big companies just proves that old big companies are monopolizing the market and using anti-competitive tactics to keep out any newcomer. That’s bad for Europe’s consumers.