Of the companies you claim weren't first-movers, your counterexamples of the "real" first-movers were also US companies. This would be a more relevant argument

Of the companies you claim weren't first-movers, your counterexamples of the "real" first-movers were also US companies. This would be a more relevant argument if some EU companies were first-movers but then got "muscled out" by US late-movers that became monopolies (and an even better argument if the EU companies were impeded by EU anti-trust rulings against them). But that's not what happened, because there were no EU first-movers, nor were there any anti-trust enforcements against any would-be EU first-movers... It's like saying you lost a race because your opponents cheated, when you weren't even at the starting line. > the US stopped enforcing its antitrust laws and gave tech companies a regulatory pass So the EU did enforce its antitrust laws during that time, and thus stopped any EU tech companies emerging as monopolies? Can you provide an example? (In fact the only anti-trust ruling I remember from early Internet era was from the US, against Microsoft.) Besides, has US ever considered anti-trust law in the context of the international market? Do they even have an obligation to do that? The government has a responsibility to its own citizens. And if what you say is true, that US neglecting to enforce anti-trust law facilitated US tech monopolies, then perhaps US citizens benefitted in the long term. Certainly I'd rather be a citizen of the country that's the dominant economic power than the subjugated one in decline... and it's not like those tech monopolies halted innovation in the US; on the contrary, it's thriving. The US has the highest levels of high-tech investment, the highest salaries, the latest tech...