There is 1.4 Billion people in China. Chinese internet firms are reaching a larger audience in China, than all the people living in North America and Europe.
It’s an interesting subject. If not for Beijing’s heavy hand, could Chinese internet companies have flourished much more and become international tech giants? Maybe, but there is one obvious counterpoint: where are the European tech giants? In an open playing field, it looks like American tech giants are pretty good at buying out or simply crushing any nascent competitors. If the Chinese did not have their censorship or great firewall, maybe the situation would have been like Europe, where the government tries to impose some rules, but doesn’t really have much traction, and everyone just ends up using Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
You can’t just do whatever the fuck you want if you have enough money in Europe.
You can’t just collect data or operate in gray areas, have underpaid workers without unions and tell everyone to fuck off.
You can’t just make a monopoly by buying everyone else without questions.
So it’s not as easy to grow big
OP also completely neglects the geopolitical and demographic history that lead to the rise of US tech companies, and the continuous brain drain from elsewhere to the US.
After WW2 Europe and Asia were destroyed. It took decades to rebuild. The benefit of this to America can’t be overstated. A significant proportion of the worlds scientific community emigrated throughout the 20th Century because of this. US tech companies had the wealthiest capitalists/investors, and the most skilled labor pool. America also had a much higher wealth inequality, so all companies that came after benefited enormously from a comparatively wealthier and experienced skilled labor pool. Then add the neoliberal low tax, low minimum wage, and undocumented slave labor funneling money to all these companies.
Capital — especially preexisting capital — is the greatest determinator for success. The EU is not doing it wrong. The US is! It’s a corporate dictatorship, now descending into totalitarian fascist dictatorship.
At the same time, China is a more united place than Europe which consists of various countries with their own economy and culture. And to be fair, some countries have had their fair share of tech giants, like Spotify, Klarna or Ericsson from Sweden for example.
Nokia (was massive) Siemens ASML SAP
I wish all bad things in the world upon SAP and it’s creators…What a miserable shitshow it is to work with, I have not met a single person who actually thought it solved anything in a good or tolerable way.
Also Soundcloud, T-Mobile, yes Spotify … A lot of open source projects are based in Europe: Gitlab, Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, a few Linux distributions, LibreOffice… I think at least the Free Software and libre culture world is pretty active, here.
Plus aside from consumer facing software, the tech sector also exports a lot of engineering. There is German wielded train tracks all around the world, car parts, Airbus (planes), tools, logistics software and robotics, companies like SAP do lots of behind the scenes stuff…
(And half the internet giants weren’t even founded in arbitrary places in the USA, but more or less just in California (Google, Apple, eBay, PayPal) the other half is more spread over the country, like Microsoft: New Mexico, Amazon: Washington, Facebook: Massachusetts if I’m not mistaken.)
Very interesting, thanks for sharing
