[philipallstar]

> That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extraction. The European Union has every right to regulate markets operating within its jurisdiction, especially when there are credible concerns about anti-competitive practices and abuse of dominance. From what I’ve seen, there may be sufficient grounds to consider collective legal action against LinkedIn at the European level. As for so-called “European nationalist ambitions,” rest assured: Europe does not lack capable lawyers or regulatory expertise. I will be forwarding the relevant material to contacts of mine working within the European institutions in Brussels.

This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.

[Barrin92]

>why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't?

because the "stuff" in question is social networks who live, as the name suggests, off network effects. To have a European LinkedIn would require everyone in Europe to switch at the same time. Which can be trivially arranged, we just would need the courage to ban LinkedIn and every other American social media company. We'd have a clone up and running in a month. You only need to look to China who did exactly this.

[csmpltn]

> "We just would need the courage to ban LinkedIn and every other American social media company. We'd have a clone up and running in a month. You only need to look to China who did exactly this."

That's socialist dictatorship. Why do you want the EU to be more like China, instead of the EU being more like the US? It will result in further isolation and decline of Europe which sorely depends both on the US (and China) for survival.

[Barrin92]

>Why do you want the EU to be more like China

I don't want to, but if people like you represent how Americans think, with nothing but contempt for Europe and only obsessed with power, then the Chinese were right about who Americans are and we were naive.

Then achieving autonomy quickly is necessary. And it's not about isolationism, just different priorities. The Chinese aren't isolated either. It's the US that's isolating itself right now as other countries see how they're treated.

[philipallstar]

> but if people like you represent how Americans think, with nothing but contempt for Europe and only obsessed with power, then the Chinese were right about who Americans are and we were naive.

I think it's much more the other way round. As a not-American, the amount of contempt I see Europeans having for Americans for not "valuing family" (i.e. lots of free childcare and maternity pay), or generally not having really expensive social programmes, and having medicine prices based on the R&D costs, when the only reason they can do that is because the US taxpayer funds most global shipping, and most health R&D in the world, is much higher than the reverse.

Saying "oh we should be autonomous" won't ever remove all the free help the US has given those countries in the past, even if they stop relying on it in the future.

[wolvoleo]

> This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.

Because the US had so much venture capital, during the time of the low interest rates it was basically free money so they could afford to throw it to the wall and see what sticks. 90% of them would sink but it didn't matter. That doesn't fly here.

Then, they used that money to subsidise adoption, and then once the users were hooked into rent extraction as the OP mentioned. We call this process enshittification these days, and it's a really predatory business practice.

European companies don't do that as much because we have more guardrails against it, and more importantly we didn't have random cash sloshing up the walls. American could do that especially because of the petrodollar. Once the dollar loses its international status it will be a lot harder to do (and it already is due to the rising interest rates).

It was no surprise that exactly with the rising interest rates all the companies started tightening up their subscriptions. Netflix, amazon, all exploding in cost and introducing ads. Same with meta's platforms.