'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'

Here's an interesting, related European history tidbit;

Most of the popular old school European Comics are from Belgium; Tintin, The Smurfs, Asterix, Lucky-Luke, etc. That doesn't mean they were all made by Belgians, there were French and Italian authors.

The reason they were based in Belgium, is because American Comic books where banned in Belgium. This is an artefact from the second world war, the American comic books were banned by the nazis. But the after-war catholic government kept the policy going for a while. In other countries, the market was flooded with American comics such as Picsou Magazine, so there were little room for other kind of comics. The Belgian market, while small, was enough to give an audience and thus work for Non-American comic authors. The ban didn't last long, but was enough to kickstart an entire industry that would eventually get good enough to compete on its own.

This fact is little documented, I learned it while studying comic book drawing in Belgium. The teacher was then complaining about the flood of Japanese Manga, which in his opinion would kill the European comic industry, as they were subsidised by a captive Japanese audience. Much of the cultural industry in France now only survives because of laws mandating that at least half the products sold must be French. And so is it with other European countries. But unfortunately those very same laws are preventing the growth of a pan European industry.

How about regulating Big Tech? Which was done with AT&T before Reagan and caused UNIX, C, Open-Source and Open-Documentation.

And encouraging and requiring open-source software development in Europe, founded by non-profit organizations and government. With requirements and control. The base for solution is readily available with Linux and BSD. Our politicians and CEOs only think in short terms. As consumers do :(

We can ban or tax things, like shipping Laptops with proprietary operating-systems. Declare, that the pre-installed operating-system must be open-source with {GPL, MIT, BSD} and fulfill standards. If not? Fine. Ship it without an operating-system.

And teach kids at school about scale of software and vendor lock-in. Every monopoly starts with being lazy and just grasping the first solution...

Bannig things as a default solution to everything is what got Europe in trouble in the first place. Zero-sum, back-to-the-trees mentality.

Chinese tech is possible cause Chinese cash is parked in China.

Meanwhile most European cash (from pension funds, wealth funds, banks etc) flows into Wall St indirectly funding Big Tech/SV etc.

You need to spend more time looking at your suppliers when they come from politically unstable regimes. That’s international procurement 101. The only real argument is about what, economically and practically, can be done about it.

> Van der Sloot: “We now see the political interference by Russia and by Big Tech itself in elections in Europe, the rise of AI, and the fact that Europe is totally dependent on America in this context. In my opinion, the only way to protect our European values is to ban all American technology in Europe within five years, not only for consumers but also for government authorities and companies. At the same time, we need to bridge the technological gap because we remain vulnerable as long as we are dependent on foreign technology.”

So bog standard protectionism is what he's advocating for. He should have a discussion with economists as he's making assumptions outside his expertise, I suspect.

More and bigger isolationism and forcing a model that worked in very different circumstances (legal, financial, cultural) does not sound smart.

> If we take the influence in the field of politics and human and privacy rights truly seriously, a ban on American tech in Europe is crucial, according to this scholar. In addition, we must work to create a European Big Tech industry.

This is inconsistent. If Europe must ban American Big Tech because of human and privacy rights (something I tend to agree with) then it should not create anything in its stead, and actively prevent a European Silicon Valley from ever happening.

It's extremely unlikely European business people are better than Americans. Once they become powerful enough, chances are they will be even more evil.

Europe is lucky we don't consider the entire western half to be a U.S. territory after WW2.

Sounds like a great way to turn public opinion in the US against continued US participation in NATO.

As a first step we should make visas more selective for troublemakers and easier to obtain for highly educated people

I have no sympathy for US, and I know I'm going to be downvoted to hell from EU-conservatists, though: Don't expect anything comparable to US big tech with all those innovation-stifling regulations that EU has.

If Europe wants to do anything that can compete with US big tech, they should get rid of those regulations first.

If you want a European Silicon Valley, you need American style values.

European investors are risk averse cowards who could never imagine putting down vast sums of money for pre-revenue, pre-profit type companies. That’s why you never get the big wins, and why you’ll never attract the big winners. They’ll just go to America.

I can't wait for another startup attaching caps to bottles

Then America must ban and tariff anticompetitive Europe.

Tit for tat.