That's not how it works, just look at MySpace. Even sites with a lot of market share are sometimes overtaken by a competitor.
The best alternative to Facebook in a fragmented market like Europe is federation across multiple social "hosting" sites with a regional focus, based on standards that are either in place already or being worked on. This can exploit even stronger platform effects than a conventional one-size-fits-all solution like Facebook.
Google and YT are in a different position since they're actually solving hard resource problems (Video streaming at scale is hard; building a usable crawl of the Web is also hard); much of their success comes from addressing these in a way that is compelling for users.
It recently blew my mind to learn just how small MySpace was. Peak user count was ~75.9 million, total. Facebook has ~2.85 billion active users.
You're ignoring that all of this money initially came from massive investment by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration (DARPA) which funded the semiconductor industry in its infancy, which funded the creation of the Internet, which funded the creation of mainframes, which funded the creation of personal computers, and continues to provide massive funding to tech companies. Heck, their decision to choose Microsoft DOS over IBM OS/2 for the US DOD literally solidified its rise as the dominant operating system. It's requirement that all parts must be multi-source-able is why AMD and Via were created as additional manufacturers of x86 processors. But it also funded PowerPC and even provided significant funding to ARM.
Sure, we don't have much socialism here (USDA farm "subsidies" not included), but we do have very strong, protectionist-welfare capitalism.
So you had the combined might of the US government founding the creation of the computing industry. That let companies take massive risks which left tons of people making tons of money before private VC even really became interested. The IPOs of the original tech companies funded the creation of half of the current major VC funds.
For example, AMD was founded within a year of Intel - years before either manufactured a CPU. You're blurring lines with antitrust lawsuits in the 90s.
Now if you want to talk about the Federal government single handedly propping up the market for semiconductors until the end of the Apollo program, that's a different story and includes more players than DARPA.
Perhaps the ending of the cold war ended this policy, thus a boom of new companies never took place.
Russia didn't ban American monopolies, they were outcompeted fair and square by the more focused local companies. For some time, at least. It took years for Google to catch up with Yandex in search quality in Russian language, and Facebook's clone is imo still better than Facebook itself in every way, no wonder it's still more popular there.
The appearance that Chinese companies have advantages over foreign companies comes from a combination of factors: local culture, understanding of the market, much much faster and fierce competition (If speed and competition in international market is 2, in China its 10. For example, Uber left China's market not because of regulatory, regulatory was equal to Didi and uber at the time, but Uber and Didi was locked into extremely heated competition at that time, both sides were pouring money down the drain. It was most likely a business decision. Alibaba's taobao vs Amazon.com, taobao was very competitive and played to the Chinese culture advantage very well. Taobao created 11/11 singles day in 2009 and hit a cord with Chinese people, even becoming a cultural phenomenon). But let say if Google/Facebook funded a team in China to create a targeted product for the Chinese market, they could have a a significant presence in the market.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
And this take is just hot garbage.
Israel should be lauded for managing to be an intensely vibrant and high-tech country, and European countries should try to learn from that, but even that is apparently not quite sufficient. So I think GP has a point.
It’s also too bad that it excludes public companies or large exits (e.g., Wix and Waze) since those are even better retorts to the “can’t build companies” claim.
The thing that separate the internet economy with the traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive home advantage with a huge cultural, legal and financially unified market. In Europe you start in a small country then face big barriers to expand out of it, which slows growth enough that you never get to get competitive by the time the much better funded American competitor comes to crush you.
And then it's game over, because you only get one shot at being the monopoly. Once you have a Facebook, you can't have a second one, even with all the VC cash, talent & creativity in the world. Notice that the USA did not succeed in building a competitor to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or Amazon, so how could Europe, or anybody else ?
Well the Chinese and the Russian could, by banning American monopolies from their own markets, which let them built monopolies on their own, & then attempt to conquer the rest of the world with them.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
And that's what Europe should do, ban American Monopolies. If we would ban facebook, instagram, youtube, etc, we'd have solid equivalents in a year, and from there enough cash flow to fund a next generation of startups.