Silicon Valley has the first-mover advantage in social networks and pretty much all other sectors in IT technology. Competitors in Europe only exist because of niches, sometimes created by regulation and mostly by cultural differences. However, the (mostly) laissez-faire approach to access to information makes it difficult to put constraints on social networks. China managed to do so thanks to their Great Firewall. The GDPR is too little, too late, and the public is too used now to scatter factoids about their private lives on the internet.