Feddit (Beta)Why there’s no European Google? And why it is a good thing!
squirrelploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html
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A really nice essay, I agree with the sentiment of it. We don’t need European tech billionaires, we need government support for open source
I like the essay’s highlighting European contributions to software and technology, but it doesn’t quite answer the fundamental question of its title:
Why there’s no European Google?
The essay’s answer is [paraphrased] “…because we don’t need it.”.
I don’t quite understand that position because if a Google wasn’t needed in Europe then Google could disappear from Europe and no one would notice or care. Yet that isn’t likely the case. If Google disappeared overnight it would likely have massive impacts on business and personal lives across Europe.
I guess my answer to the article’s question as to “Why is there no European Google” is that creating Google (or a European Google) is extremely resource and financially expensive. Unless the funding for that effort comes from somewhere, it won’t just happen in Europe spontaneously without replicating the same private business model that many dislike about Google.
P.S. Another European created technology that should be added to the list for accolades is the creation of Deepmind machine learning/AI. This also lead to the creation of Google Gemini. While this is owned by Google, it was created out of the London offices.
What if you rephrased the question to “Why isn’t there a major EU computer/Internet company?”
I don’t see how that rephrasing changes the outcome of the question. What’s your view on it? What is the difference you’re seeing with that modified question?
The modified question takes a step back and asks why isn’t any EU innovation being used to create EU tech champions that can compete on the level of any US tech champion.
Losing in one tech monopoly could be bad luck. Losing in all tech monopolies indicates that there may be major structural problems in the EU preventing these kinds of companies being created.
TheAsianDonKnotsI want the LHC with a functioning rail system that can accelerate a 1x1 brick 2-3 times before it disappears into the target.
Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!
Let’s please not romanticize european business culture. Nestle doesn’t give a shit about mankind as a whole. Neither do Danone or H&M.
SzewekI get your point. But any collective myth will overlook a lot reality. Americans actually help each other and organize themselves in their communities, despite the hassle culture. Chinese had many failed attempts at dominating industries. Many Russians actually prefer a calm and good life to the glory of their country.
In a way, a myth is more about what we want to be than what we are. Or, the part of ourselves we are proud of.
The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.
It could, obviously, just be international. There are people giving away inventions to mankind all around the world, though not equally distributed. But there is a window of opportunity for big part of Europe to embrace these values as our, though not exclusively our. The local aspect is beneficial, since it gives the universal values a sense of belonging and strong institutions.
Maybe we can find a best of both worlds outcome where we contribute to open source and have also competitive payment. Many of the „giants“ also contribute significantly to open source.
NiquarlIt’s kind of weird on floss platform like Lemmy that some people don’t seem to get the point the author is making which I’d interpret as a rejection of the need to have big business interests against a successful commons.
I’m surprised some seem to miss the idea that success shouldn’t be tied to money, it seems pretty explicit in the blogpost.
There’s been at a certain level a talking up of the USA as a leader in tech and more broadly culture but that’s because they’ve got bigger advertising budgets at the end of the day.
0xteroWe often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the “success culture.”
What does that even mean? Europe is 44 countries with VAST number of languages and cultures. It includes Russia by the way.
This recent trend of comparing “Europe to America” like they were somehow equivalents and talking having “European alternatives” is a strange piece of feudalism. And now this imaginary Europe doesn’t seem to have “success culture”. Of course it doesn’t because Europe where such thing could exist is just a fever dream.
Europe is not EU either. And even if we’re talking about just EU, it’s really not one homogeneous cultural entity either, it’s 27 sovreign countries, each with their own cultures tied very loosely together in a monetary, free-market union, nothing more.
I don’t know why we’re romanticizing USA by comparing some imaginary European equivalent to it?
Most articles in this vein use Europe for shorthand for the EU. Chileans and Bolivians feel similarly about America being used as shorthand for the USA.
The EU is obviously more than a common market today, evidenced in law, courts, institutions, schools, banks, telecoms, arts, society, science. It has a definite common identity, albeit one that is typically not predominant by design. It doesn’t detract from national identities.
Maybe Europe should have more integration so it can better stand up against the US, China, and Russia, all three of whom would probably love to tear apart Europe for themselves
Maybe Europe should have more integration so it can better stand up against the US, China, and Russia
Just highlighting that, because it was the point of of message. Russia is part of Europe. “Europe” as a term is about as muddy as “America”.
What is this “Europe” everyone is talking about?
I guess when people talk about Europe they mainly mean the EU and countries allied with it (UK, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, etc). Russia is Eurasian anyway: some territory traditionally considered to be within the historical borders of Europe, and lots of territory within Asia.
Ok, so when we talk about more integration on EU level, in order to establish “success culture” - what kind of integration are we talking about?
Even on EU level, we’re 27 sovereign states, with many different languages, currencies and most importantly cultures. It’s not really even remotely analogous to current day USA.
Yes there are different languages and cultures in Europe; I don’t want to diminish those. Integration between European countries is still possible though. Look at Airbus, which is registered as a “Societas Europaea” (European company), and which has manufacturing facilities in multiple European countries. Airbus is one of the leading global companies in aviation. Maybe one day Europe will have some big tech companies with offices across Europe. Currently there are companies like Spotify and SAP but of course they’re not as big as Google, Microsoft, or Tencent in China, etc.
So let me get this right? In order to “feel European” we need to have huge tech companies that aim to dominate the global market so we can all feel proud when we see their office logotypes in all the cities we visit?
That’s the vibe of the “success culture” we want to build?
Should be easy, just allow monopolies and let companies gobble up their competition without question. Weaken worker power and agency and then fail to regulate interoperability and bang, we have our own tech giants as well.
Let me expand on this a bit:
Monopolies / lack of competition — When platforms dominate markets, they no longer fear losing users or business customers to rivals, which emboldens them to degrade quality.
Weak worker power / agency — Tech workers once had leverage to resist harmful design or policy choices; as layoffs and labor fragmentation eroded that leverage, platforms faced fewer internal pressures to restrain “enshittifying” moves.
Erosion of regulation and interoperability — Regulatory bodies have been captured or weakened, and technical constraints (like the ability for third parties to interoperate or fix products) have been removed or outlawed. Without strong regulation or the ability for users and competitors to interoperate, platforms can enforce lock-in and extract more value without consequence.
This is what we’ve come to call “enshittification” and it’s the trademark of all the major platforms you mentioned.
If this is what you want from “Europe” then just let me get off this “success train” before it leaves the station.
Nokia was the European Google (i.e tech giant) The reason there’s no European Google is due to undercapitalization and market fragmentation. Most of the US doesn’t have these things either. It’s all located in a small part of California
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European search index by Ecosia and Qwant:
https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
The article is about Europeans sharing their inventions instead of making them into monopolies that make billionaires instead of helping the common good.
But upboat for Ecosia!
Despite the title, the article presents many well reasoned arguments that Europeans are making many important contributions to technology and society and that it is better to do it the European way rather than becoming better at creating monopolies and extracting wealth from society, like the big American tech. companies.
See also the Openwebsearch initiative, who are trying to make a provider agnostic index made in the EU: https://openwebsearch.eu/
The bot behind this initiative has been appearing in server logs for years, but there are still no meaningful results. After all, how useful is an index ("9.15 Billion URLs crawled") if there is no search engine? I finally just blocked the bot.
Yeah, I hope someone makes an engine based on this, that seems like a really important step that is currently missing completely.
Is there a way to use this? I mean for end users?
Sadly no, a search engine has to adopt the index first. So im still waiting for an open source initiative that uses this.
I like this text very much!
People should concentrate more on what’s important in life :)
We miss you too :( . However, we, as a country, also have a lot of personal shit to work through, so it’ll probably be a while.
The poor English in the title actually makes it ambiguous
Why we have no technology and it’s actually a good thing !
Also completely wrong since there is Qwant and Mojeek (I didn’t mention the rest since they are entirely reliant on either Bing, Google or brave in the case of GOOD)
Another terrible sensationalist headline with nice double speech included.
Shame since the article itself is actually decent.
Nothing sensationalist about it, it says exactly what the article is about. We don’t have mega tech companies and that is a good thing
Fuck mega tech companies, long love open source everything