Because it's very hard to compete against monopolies when there are network effects. What you can do is regulate them. The US government has been working very hard in the last decades to prevent that.

Recommended: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Yes of course I can be honest. We don't have any of that. But if I'd sketch out a genuine European future in software to me it would look something like this. You have technologies like Tim Berner Lee's Solid[1] and social protocols like Mastodon/Bluesky/etc owned as public infrastructure and operated by its people. You could imagine each region of Europe having its own sovereign digital space federated with individuals owning their data, a genuine network mirroring the region as it is.

The big problem with this isn't just technical, it's mental. The user of today anywhere is a consumer. It's like turning a serf into a citizen. I don't think this is a five year vision, it's more like a 50 year program. I think it's going to be a long time until we've convinced people that taking ownership of and participating in their digital life, being tinkerers, owners, netizens is vital.

[1]https://solidproject.org

Apart from that it's hard to take statements from such an ignorant US centristic point of view about what europe is/has/has not seriously.

Let's see how things will play out for europe and how our souvereignty efforts will impact the US economy.

There is not ONE person that works in Finance or Accounting, at least in the US and Europe, that doesn't know "what SAP does", even if they have never used one of their products.