[yoavm]

Billions of euros over multiple decades? Why?

Seems to me like it's mainly regulation. The thing that makes people in China, or Russia, for example, not use Google - isn't that Yandex / Baidu got tons of investments. It is that people can't easily access Google. If the EU decides to pull the switch (or if the US decides to do so), we have enough competence people here to build a search engine.

[okanat]

That's where democratic governments at a disadvantage. Europe is also more integrated into US market. For example, killing access to Google ads ecosystem will make 100s of thousands or even millions of people unemployed. Apple and Google have multiple offices in Europe. A divorce with US will again make a huge amount of people lose their very high paying jobs. Unlike China and Russia those people can vote.

Moreover, in democracies companies from other countries usually get more say and have more lobbying power. Open market system gives more decision powers to global players. Whereas in China or Russia, if you are not serving the goals of the dictatorial rule, you get ousted permanently without a fear of elections.

[yoavm]

I think those things are very hard to predict. Yes, many Europeans will stop working for American companies and lose their very high paying jobs. On the other hand, the EU as a whole will stop sending billions of euros to the American economy, and at least some of this money will be invested in creating local alternatives; Those who worked for American companies will probably find their place in these alternatives.

Everything you wrote about the open market system is true, except it seems like that system have died over the past year. Europeans understand now that the US isn't a friend.

[okanat]

My worry there isn't (just) Europeans who directly work for American companies but Europeans who work in the _markets_ that US companies created.

For example almost all digital marketing agencies are almost pure resellers of big tech products: ads on Facebook, Google or Microsoft networks. Similarly majority backend solutions are delivered over 3 big cloud providers' specialized products like AWS Lambda or GCP BigQuery. The definition of Mobile Software developer is someone who writes software for Google or Apple platforms. The entire fields will disappear overnight.

[usrnm]

Google was freely available in Russia up until 2022 and Yandex still had a larger market share. It really was a solid competitor to Google, much better than anything the EU ever had.