It's frankly far more derisive of me and any reader really to say that because "free market" has the word "free" in it that the majority of people will cosign it happily with no further thought. Do you also think the DPRK is a democracy because it says so?
The EU has a large menagerie of businesses, successful and otherwise. If hiring friction and tax policy were the whole story, you'd expect the EU to lag in all capital-intensive industries, not just have a specific gap in hyperscale tech, which is the one sector most directly shaped by network effects and first-mover advantage from a market that let a handful of US firms scale first.
Additionally I'd push back on the premise that "doesn't produce hyperscalers" is even a mark against a system in the first place. They're what you get after competition has mostly finished collapsing into a handful of winners who then run the supposedly free market. Funny how the same people who'll lecture you for an hour about the sacred competitive forces of the free market go quiet the second vertical integration and monopoly-adjacent scale start choking those forces out.
Wrong
It is used pejorativly but that does not make it devoid of meaning
It refers to the social policies instituted in the 1980s that (attempted to) inserted competition into every facet of human relationships
It was instituted by liberals
It was new (and a dreadful policy that has lead to the discrediting of liberalism generally)
Hence "neo-liberal
You are welcome
Also, the reason the EU does not have that many tech companies is not global competition; it's that it takes 6 months to hire someone, you cannot fire them ever, and nations tax you based on your unrealized valuation because they don't really believe you should be running things on your own.