The EU gave us Spotify, SoundCloud, Minecraft, and Angry Birds. There's plenty of EU software companies you've heard of. It's true that most brand name consum

The EU gave us Spotify, SoundCloud, Minecraft, and Angry Birds. There's plenty of EU software companies you've heard of. It's true that most brand name consumer software is from (companies headquartered in) America right now, though all of the major companies also have dozens of offices in Europe. (Chrome's V8 was famously written in Denmark, before Google even had an office in that country.) Are you suggesting this could be a response to American companies hiring people in EU countries, but avoiding paying their share of corporate taxes there? That's possible, but it doesn't sound to me like that's the reason. I think it's at least as likely they're hedging against the different countries in the EU each developing their own (incompatible) software and playing against each other. In politics and business, America tends towards "market will solve all", while the EU tends towards "there's dozens of us so we need to cooperate to get anything done". Maybe they looked at America and saw it as a cautionary tale. California has a massively disproportionate power over everything related to computers today. Europe has a bit of history with one member state trying to exert a disproportionate power over the rest.