Yeah, obviously it does matter if there is literally no competitors, but that's not the case here. There are competitors in the space already.

One major difference between how the US and Europe views monopolies is that most of Europe tries to prevent even the formation of them (exceptions apply), while the US tries to prevent "dangerous" monopolies, while allowing monopolies themselves.

It could be useful to shift the perspective if you're used to the US one, when looking at decisions made by European agencies like the CMA.

>It could be useful to shift the perspective if you're used to the US one, when looking at decisions made by European agencies like the CMA.

Sure. On the other hand, it could be useful to listen to Microsoft's perspective on being obstructive to business rather than accusing them of "whining" given that Europe lags behind in technological innovation despite being similarly well educated.

What do you mean by "Europe lags behind in technological innovation"? Do you have any data to back that up? US Big Tech is going well thanks to near monopoly on online advertising, and as a result can afford spending ridiculous amount of money on anything, but I'm not sure I'd call that technological innovation.

> given that Europe lags behind in technological innovation

True in some sense, like cool innovations like Ubers for X and social media. False in some sense that there been innovation coming from Europe as well, small things like the web, GSM, CRISPR, LHC, renewables and other almost irrelevant things.

I think technological innovations comes from all continents and I don't think you can surely say that one lags behind another when considering innovation with big impact, everyone is contributing in their way and some in some fields while lagging in others.

Obviously, the LHC isn't going to blocked by antitrust. I'm specifically talking about disruptive technology-related businesses. When is the last time Europe has produced a company like Moderna, Tesla, or OpenAI?

Since your argument was "Europe lags behind in technological innovation", which is not related to companies per-se, wouldn't it be more interesting for you to find out what kind of technological advances Europe has been leading?

But since I already shared that with you, here are some companies doing interesting "disruptive" stuff, which seems more interesting to you:

- Vertical farming -> Infarm (Germany), Agricool (France)

- Electric mobility -> Northvolt (Sweden)

- Quantum computing -> IQM (Finland), Pasqal (France)

- Biotechnology and synthetic biology -> Oxford Nanopore Technologies (UK), Synthace (UK)

- Renewable energy -> Vestas (Denmark), Oxford PV (UK)

While writing all of this out, I'm starting to think that maybe you're just trolling, as obviously there is technological innovation coming from all continents and someone can't be so thick to think it all comes from the US, right?

Obviously, a wealthy continent of over 700 million people is going to produce some technological innovation. I'm just saying that they lag behind. I haven't heard of any of these companies you listed.

As you mentioned, Europe has biotech and the US has biotech. So why did Moderna come from the US rather than the Europe? Same for EVs and social media. Rather than use home grown messenger apps like KaoKaoTalk and Line, they use Whatsapp, which isn't even widely used in the US. Could it be that Microsoft is correct that businesses are burdened by regulation? I honestly can't say, but it's definitely worth analyzing rather than dismissing this criticism as "whining". That's the trolling that you should be concerned about rather than comments on the Internet.