[lossolo]

> Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K.

It is. As you said, Meta and Google started with small investments, but now they are multi trillion dollar behemoths. Any company, even with millions of dollars in funding, can’t compete with them because they have tens of thousands of developers and infrastructure worth tens or even hundreds of billions of USD. They have penetrated the entire EU market and have enough money to burn, allowing them to survive any competition that isn’t state funded. The risk for private capital is huge, and the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.

The only alternative would have been the Chinese route, building local equivalents of Google, AWS, Amazon, Meta etc. like they did in China but it seems that ship has already sailed for the EU, given the current state of things.

[disgruntledphd2]

> the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.

This isn't true, it's just that all of the EU excess capital gets invested in the US, so it appears true.

[lossolo]

Of course, it is true. The EU also does not have a reserve currency and cannot print 2 trillion a year. Where do you think the majority of these 2 trillion goes?