I think it's more of a case of "most electronics and everything that runs on it is not made in Europe". I'm a European posting on an American company's forum using a browser made in the US running on an operating system made by an American company running on a phone designed and built in China with components made in a variety of countries that aren't in Europe. The same goes for using a desktop PC. Even most of the websites you end up using aren't made in Europe.

And that's talking about the things that are already there. Looking into the future I don't see anything technology related on the horizon either.

The main technological thing that isn't like that is cars, but even there EVs from Tesla appear more innovative.

I think that comparing only the technology sector gives a wrong perspective on the amount of research being done: According to the National Science Foundation of the USA https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20206/publication-output-by-re... The EU actually produces more research papers than China or the US. (of course that isn't a perfect metric, but it's still an indicator)

I think that many people conflate "innovation" with "big companies" which isn't the case: You don't need a google/Apple/Facebook equivalent to innovate (and having such towering companies may hurt in the long run, but wether or not big "googlesque" companies are a good thing is an entirely different question)

There are also a lot of unknown companies that have huge influence on the overall market by being global leaders in very narrow non-consumer facing areas, so called "hidden champions". These companies have become more important due to globalisation. To give a concrete example: While your phone wasn't built in the EU, odds are that it was at least partially produced with machines by ASML, a company that produces lithography machines for ~80% of chip manufacturers.

Also, due to this site here literally being "hackernews" and the pervasiveness of digital systems in normal life, we are getting a pretty skewd look at the industry as a whole: For example, the biggest chemical company in the world is BASF, a european company and the chemical company Bayer now owns a majority share of agricultural chemistry.

Also EU has Airbus, and the US imports its civil engineering (tunnels, trains, and huge machinery) from Europe

Linux was developed by finnish guy and the www protocol was developed by a brit.

Interesting that you picked two examples where the innovation wasn’t commercialized and the innovator did not become rich. I suspect there‘s some cultural aspect to that.

IMO this is a big difference: I'd actually feel quit bad about becoming rich off th back oef a technology or innovation that I could have made more open and widely available.

Would you say Windows is not widely available?

Uhm, Linus makes seven figures.

And his nearest peers made 10 figures.

30 years ago and 40 years ago, respectively

30 years ago you would have said that Microsoft dominates and www is a niche thing. And Turing was already 50 years ago.

It’s likely that something significant is going on in Europe that we don’t know about yet.

It's easy to point to hundred-billion dollar projects in the US from the last 20 years.

LHC at CERN (Switzerland), XFEL at DESY in Hamburg (Germany), ITER in France, etc. (probably all have a lot of non-EU funding though)

The EU Horizon 2020 budget is 70 billion EUR, spent over basically 6 years. Around 80 billion is now being spent as post-pandemic stimulus, but less than what was proposed by the Commission.

That said, you're probably right that US pumps hundreds of billions into "innovation" (let's say R&D) whereas it's just a hundred for the EU.

Fortunately the EU is catching up, but alas it's not because it's so aggressively allocating more for R&D, though the trend is positive, but the US' trend is at best flat, maybe even negative: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (Of course these are GDP percentages, and since the US' economy is bigger, the absolute numbers are a lot bigger for the US. And that's why even though Japan's percentage looks best, their absolute amount is below what the EU spends on R&D.)

Your phone's CPU was designed in the UK! (alas Arm are now owned by a Japanese company)

To be owned by an American company (NVIDIA)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-12/nvidia-is...

Actually it originated in a joint venture of Apple, VLSI Technology, and Acorn.

That's the company ARM. The processor had been developed five years previously by Acorn.