I think an answer based on counter factuals was expected. Such as: if Faang salaries didn’t exert a global brain drain, if non US markets allowed competitors to Faang to exist, etc etc then the landscape would be different.

I find your answer rather shallow.

Is not having an equivalent of Facebook or Google a bad thing?

It is when you are busy investigating those companies for being monopolies...

I think we'd all be better off in the long run if the EU did more to hobble American tech companies operating in the EU.

Well, all except shareholders of those companies.

Facebook and Google are bad.

We need something better. Hobbling them won’t achieve that.

Why do you think that? If those companies are hobbled, that will give any EU competitor to them some breathing room.

Yeah - I’m aware of this way of thinking.

If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that.

If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.

If you hobble them through protectionism, you create a vacuum which will be filled by a clone.

The clone will then have the same incentives to preserve the status quo as Google and Facebook are doing, just with different ownership.

The only way to replace Google and Facebook with something better is to identify and invest in something better - I.e. something that offers value that they can’t.

I do believe that government investment, can help with this.

I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.

> If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that. If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.

I think the result would be inherently "actually" superior by virtue of being under the thumb of EU regulation to a degree that American corporations aren't. I'm not talking about technical superiority, which I don't care about. Having locally regulated technically inferior clones is preferable to the status quo.

> I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.

And such laws are best enforced against local companies, not foreign companies with foreign values. That's why it's a good idea for the EU to hobble, if not outright ban, American internet companies.

What laws do you think would make things better and which ones are not being enforced?

What kinds of regulation on social networking and or search would produce a better product?

You're ignoring the fact of FB, Google et al opening offices all over Germany/EU and paying ludicrous salaries to even junior devs. It is a form of resource theft IMHO.

They have the deep coffers to lure young people who otherwise might've started their own businesses. As a result, the IT and developer market is entirely fucked up here in Southern Germany. Yes, yes, "software eating the World" and all that — but the big players (US corps, mostly) are not just by buying up most of the talent but _they create unhealty expectations for the rest of the crowd_.

_"I know where to put a semicolon in JS, I expect a starting salary of €100k"_ etc.

If they actually truly know where semicolons go in JS, then they may be worth €100k. That's some deep magic, which has bitten this very, very experienced developer in the ass more than once.

Getting it right in Java or C is no special feat. Getting it 100% correct in Javascript... that's an accomplishment.

From the other point of view of having worked for US software companies all my life, I think the developer market is fucked up in the rest of the world because talented developers are getting criminally underpaid.

a) You're acting as if no one earning a good salary saves up for taking risks later.

b) How entitled can you be to tell other people that it's fucked up not to risk it all to make a business where you please, or not to request salaries the industry is willing to pay. All in the name of... what? Nationalism?