Why there’s no European Google? And why it is a good thing!

European search index by Ecosia and Qwant:
https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/

Despite the title, the article presents many well reasoned arguments that Europeans are making many important contributions to technology and society and that it is better to do it the European way rather than becoming better at creating monopolies and extracting wealth from society, like the big American tech. companies.

See also the Openwebsearch initiative, who are trying to make a provider agnostic index made in the EU: https://openwebsearch.eu/

I like this text very much!

People should concentrate more on what’s important in life :)

“It’s hard to be more European than the Web! It looks like the Official European Joke! (And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)”

We miss you too :( . However, we, as a country, also have a lot of personal shit to work through, so it’ll probably be a while.

The poor English in the title actually makes it ambiguous

Why we have no technology and it’s actually a good thing !

Also completely wrong since there is Qwant and Mojeek (I didn’t mention the rest since they are entirely reliant on either Bing, Google or brave in the case of GOOD)

Another terrible sensationalist headline with nice double speech included.

Shame since the article itself is actually decent.

A really nice essay, I agree with the sentiment of it. We don’t need European tech billionaires, we need government support for open source

I like the essay’s highlighting European contributions to software and technology, but it doesn’t quite answer the fundamental question of its title:

Why there’s no European Google?

The essay’s answer is [paraphrased] “…because we don’t need it.”.

I don’t quite understand that position because if a Google wasn’t needed in Europe then Google could disappear from Europe and no one would notice or care. Yet that isn’t likely the case. If Google disappeared overnight it would likely have massive impacts on business and personal lives across Europe.

I guess my answer to the article’s question as to “Why is there no European Google” is that creating Google (or a European Google) is extremely resource and financially expensive. Unless the funding for that effort comes from somewhere, it won’t just happen in Europe spontaneously without replicating the same private business model that many dislike about Google.

P.S. Another European created technology that should be added to the list for accolades is the creation of Deepmind machine learning/AI. This also lead to the creation of Google Gemini. While this is owned by Google, it was created out of the London offices.

I want the LHC with a functioning rail system that can accelerate a 1x1 brick 2-3 times before it disappears into the target.

Do you really want a European Google?

The biggest reasons I see is that Europe is still a collection nation states whit each having it’s own language, culture, laws and needs, EU hasn’t removed those (yet, god forbid). There really is no single market for many services like there is in the US, in Europe you have to develop and sometimes apply for permits and licenses for each country even with the EU, since EU usually regulates retroactively not so much proactively.

The second is that there is nothing like the US federal government or military that could fund and/or bootstrap tech companies with contracts. Like google, SpaceX and Microsoft have both benefited massively from taking lucrative contracts from military government and US intelligence agencies in the past. Those allowed them to grow and consolidate first cover the US and then springboard themselves global.

SearXNG exists and Qwant is one search engine that I know of.

I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that “open” is every bit as ambiguous as “free” here - i’ve had way too many arguments with people who thought “open” just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was “open” just because you can look through the window and see products).

However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html

Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html

(That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)

All this nice opensource code still is executed on hardware owned (Intellectual Property/IP) by AMD/Intel/Qualcomm/NVIDIA/Apple. Having nice European-Open Source projects is not enough without the hardware layer and standards (instruction sets, drivers), which are owned IP by US cooperation’s.

Also one needs to consider cooperation between military-complex/secret-service and big-tech cooperation, which are basically hidden subsidies for the civilian part of the business. And if eu governments do not subsidize their own tech standards similarly they will get out-competed naturally.