In some ways I wish the EU would ban US tech companies, EU basically has no indigenous tech landscape compared to Russia and China who have suppressed US tech.
Do recall that the EU has imposed quite a bit of regulation on US tech companies, remember all the requirements that EU citizen data be located in the EU? An outright ban however is unlikely between allied democratic nations, but it is certainly within their right
There is this false idea that setting up an AWS or Google or Facebook competitor is in some way difficult. It’s not, if Meta, AWS, Google were banned in the EU perfectly functional European equivalents would pop up very rapidly similar to Russia and China.
> There is this false idea that setting up an AWS or Google or Facebook competitor is in some way difficult.
I personally think it is difficult due to scale and economics.
That is not to say Europeans can't grow a competitor in cloud, search or social media -- of course they can. There's a deep talent pool in Europe. But there's a lot of friction to doing tech at scale in EU. Large amounts of capital is much harder to raise, and varied regulatory environments/languages add cost to scaling. Plus you have to treat the UK and non-EU European countries as a separate markets.
The difference between EU vs China (and to some extent Russia) is the latter have similar abilities to scale as the U.S.
Also competitive advantages can be difficult to beat. AWS had a 8 year lead over Azure and while Azure is a lot better these days, it's still not all the way there. GCP, even though it is backed by one of the greatest and most highly capitalized large-scale engineering orgs on the planet, struggles to get appreciable marketshare.
Which, I think, would be a good thing on mid and longer term. Because the vacuum would create positions to be filled. And Europe does have tech, and especially would have tech, if it were given some room.
They don't allow foreign companies to operate in China at all. You must form a 51% / 49% partnership where the 51% is a Chinese-owned company.
Worse, they do have different standards for domestic and foreign products. TikTok, for example, is banned in China. The approved social media app carries state crafted propaganda. A year or so ago you'd see employment information for women on WeChat. Now you see advice for staying home and raising children, because the state decided that's what women should do in China.
Chinese companies are Chinese government entities. The government there fully understands that tools like WeChat and TikTok can be used to move public opinion or distract, degrade, and erode and they use them to do exactly that.
They don't allow foreign companies to operate in China at all. You must form a 51% / 49% partnership where the 51% is a Chinese-owned company.
The 51% can be a Chinese individual, and IIRC that's the most common way that VIE arrangements are set up.
In practice, the foreign company still exerts control (via contract with the 51% owner) and keeps the profits (via contract with the JV entity).
Worse, they do have different standards for domestic and foreign products.
I'm curious to know what you mean by this. Do you mean:
A) Different standards based on the location of the provider?
B) Different standards based on the location of the consumer?
If you mean (A), then I'm not sure your example supports it, unless you consider Douyin to be a foreign supplier.
If you mean (B), then that's what I'm trying to say: China requires certain things of all companies (irrespective of the location of their controllers or beneficial owners).
Because FB is too dangerous. It allows access to sway opinions of the people. Zuckerberg may have been in it for the advertising money, but Xi looks at social media platforms as weapons first, and commercial exercises second.
But having non-democratic, adversarial nations controlling the algorithm that programs us is quite scary. At large scale, that does something.