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.
Try pondering on the opposite for a bit: a market where the people with the biggest guns can coerce others to give up valuables. Where participants are actively left to die because the governing body only allow a single person to treat ill people. Etc.
When we have a grasp of an unfair malgoverned market, then we can think about what a fair we'll governed 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.
Ariane is expensive now. But that wasn't the case for decades. Everything wasn't static in the eighties or nineties and won't be from here to eternity either. American rockets were very expensive as well.
As we speak, companies like Rocket Factory Augsburg are developing cheap access to orbit.
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.
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.