Sure, but can you be honest and admit that you don't have any of this yet? Just to take a simple thing like messaging, Europeans mainly use WhatsApp (US), FB Messenger (US), and Telegram (Russian) to communicate.
> SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap
Okay I will give you that one. Market cap doesn't always equal ubiquity though; ask your non technical (or even most of your technical) friends what SAP does and you will get blank stares. Ask them what Microsoft does and you will usually get a reasonable answer that's not "Notepad with AI".
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.
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.
I don't think the thing holding back Europe's tech market is that the US encourages allies to not allow backdooring proprietary software, or the cries that it's unfair that the US doesn't strangle their own tech market with equally burdensome regulation. The problem Europe's tech industry has faced is that the EU killed it in the crib with regulations, and now there's more fear of "what if there are bad side effects in being successful" than there is fear of never being successful.
Yes, it'd be great if there was a thriving market of mid-sized EU tech companies working in a well-regulated and consumer friendly market. There just isn't, though. I'm generally a fan of Doctorow, but the idea that the EU is just a few hackers reverse-engineering a new client for teams/youtube/whatsapp away from that world is hard for me to see.
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.
"Encouraging allies" is a pretty damn generous interpretation of it.
Regarding what's "holding back Europe's tech market", I think that Europe has a different culture. Not having big monopolies is a feature, not a bug. In that sense, the regulations don't fail.
But it is very difficult to compete with monopolies unless you become one and lock your position. If the regulations prevent that (and again, that's a feature), then it becomes impossible.
Trying an analogy:
If we impose strict animal welfare rules on our own chicken farmers, that's a feature. But if we then allow unlimited imports of cheaper chicken raised with no such rules, it becomes unfair to our farmers, doesn't it?
It will be way more than 50 years unless EU nations' governments start funding lean, savvy grassroots programs that invest in digital services like you say.
I'm talking a few thousands to local volunteer groups for the cost of hosting infrastructure or tax incentives to companies for actually providing this local infrastructure, not 50k to some bureaucrat in Brussels for drawing up plans to do so.