&gt; If we want a &#x27;European Google&#x27; or European startups in general, we need to become less risk averse, more willing to reward the types of people needed to work in those companies and less obsessed about regulations.<p>I think we don&#x27;t. Europe just isn&#x27;t setup for breakaway successes in the way that the US is. And we wouldn&#x27;t be able to stomach the societal cost even if we were to try.<p>Europe <i>is</i> built to enable a Mittelstand [1] though which also allows for lots of diversity and innovation and is why Germany is still an industrial powerhouse.<p>If Europe wants to compete it should do so on its own terms; except doing so is virtually impossible when companies can claim ownership of their users data because that inevitably leads to the massive centralized monopolies we&#x27;re seeing now.<p>One thing Europe <i>is</i> good at though is pushing through laws which prevent companies from establishing harmful monopolies though and <i>that</i> is what Europe needs to do.<p>If in addition to &quot;the right to be forgotten&quot; Europe would push through &quot;the right to own your data&quot; and forced companies operating in the EU to return <i>all</i> user data (down to request logs used for analytics) to the user the dynamics of tech industry would change dramatically; and in a positive way for the user too.<p>That will take a while but I think, or hope, it will happen eventually and either way; it will have a much greater chance of success than trying to copy a model that is inherently at odds with a value system developed over dozens of centuries.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mittelstand" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mittelstand</a>