Re:Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed ...
by ivan_gammel on Wednesday July 04, 2018 @11:50PM
(#17460742)
Yandex is quite successful despite not being American, so a local search engine business in Western Europe would not be impossible (www and mp3 are European inventions, so could be the PageRank algorithm). Europe is more open to competition and American rivals usually have much more money for a blitzkrieg. It's more like competition of financial markets, than technology or business model.
I don't think Google could've been built in Europe, but as a European I certainly would love more European products in tech: one advantage is that Europeans think in localisation by default, and some American products start our being very USA centric.