It's not an absurd statement, it's the truth. Europe can't compete with American web tech (and probably even software in general). Think about it. In your day to day dealings with computers, what percentage of the software you use is American/European? I'm betting it's something like 99:1 (unless you try to make the claim the Linux is Finnish even though the majority of the developers for it are American and the creator himself is an American citizen). Compare to cars, which are more evenly split between countries (Japanese, European, American, etc.).

I'm not backtracking on that argument.

OP made a poor attempt to excuse Europe's lack of competitiveness in the software/web tech scene by waving their hands and saying "We invented all of it" (which is highly debatable). Claiming that Europe invented the web because HTTP came out of CERN and some European person envisioned a global network is bogus. Those are only tiny parts of what make up "the web". You conveniently sweep ARPANET, TCP/IP, and other core web technologies under the rug.