I agree, but it is more the costumer facing tech that the EU does not do well. All of FAANG started out as B2C tech products/services. In these markets the EU

I agree, but it is more the costumer facing tech that the EU does not do well. All of FAANG started out as B2C tech products/services. In these markets the EU is at a natural disadvantage compared to the US, China and maybe even Russia. It is much easier to grow if you have just one huge country that you can grow within before expanding internationally. But then one should also ask, why hasn't such a B2C tech company emerged in Germany or France or Italy, all of which have sizable populations. I guess the tech people in these countries where getting hired by traditional industries to work on boring industrial applications. And the finance people were in no mood to finance a web search engine or a social network in those days. We had lots of Amazons and lots of Facebooks but they never attempted to expand beyond the national borders of their respective countries. I guess some of them were relatively profitable, so maybe they thought they had a nice deal going on, until the American giants came knocking on the door.