SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump's trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies.
The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades.
[...] The EU would use a so-called draft "Enforcement Regulation" if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to grind the World Trade Organization (WTO) to a halt.
[...] The EU is hoping to emulate past successes, such as its development of the GSM mobile global standard, which fueled the rise of companies such as Nokia.
[...] The document seeks more stringent measures to block Chinese companies from taking part in tenders in Europe to penalize them for the level of subsidies that they receive from the government in Beijing.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/22/europe-plan-trump-tech-companies-1472326
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:48PM (8 children)
I guess you never heard of GSM cellphone standard or Airbus or any of the numerous fine European companies. There is nothing wrong with investing in companies or research involving critical infrastructure at a national level. If you don't, you'll find yourself beholden to some idiot somewhere that starts a trade war with you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:19PM (2 children)
Unless, of course, you nurtured a economy that doesn't need large infusions of money from you in order to do the things they should be doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)
Good luck with your "nurtured a economy" when it comes to funding armed forces, postal system, health system, aerospace, etc. You really think corporations are going to build your country? Governments all over the world invest in areas of their countries where corporations won't or can't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:06AM
Luck? You just need to spend the money competently.
Corporate welfare being a huge example of the "invest" approach they use.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @02:55AM (4 children)
GSM came out of CEPT and was paid for by telcos. Airbus was an ongoing series of mergers of European aviation industry companies and consortia, with financial assistance from various EU governments (e.g. France had been propping up Aérospatiale more or less forever). None of that came out of EU-funded research initiatives.
In particular in this case they want to take on Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. Europe is culturally incapable of doing that, name one single mainstream software product at the level of Windows, Office, OS X, Gmail, etc, that comes from Europe. Apart from SAP from Germany there's basically nothing, and even SAP is a specialised back-end product. The problem, as a friend of mine who works for a major German software vendor put it, is that "the European approach is to set up a study group and spend ten years studying and standardising and planning and agreeing on how to do it, and then look back and realise that by about the third year of the process an American company has already brought a product that did that to market. Alternatively, realise at the tenth year that what we've finally agreed to build isn't wanted any more".
Oh, and just for reference, I'm European, so this isn't a US person bashing the EU, it's a European frustrated that all the software I use comes from the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:27AM (1 child)
Uh, Linux.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:41AM
Linux came from contributors everywhere. Even if you assume exclusively that Linux == Linus, he spent the initial five years working on it in Europe and the remaining 23 years when it went mainstream and took over in the US.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:40AM (1 child)
StarDivision (Germany) produced StarOffice, which begat OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
The problem with most of the products you mentioned, is that they are inevitably monopolies. Interoperability requirements has led to near monocultures in most of these categories. This is not a reflection on the countries, but on the companies which got there first and entrenched themselves. No one can produce a Windows replacement. No one can produce an Office replacement. Because they are so huge and complex, that to replace it you have to be equivalent to it. Making a better, alternative product is possible and has been done, but it's not going to be as interoperable, and that's going to kill its commercial viability. That's why most alternative operating systems are niche embedded stuff or server-side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:22AM
Even Office is not interoperable with Office. I have to open old Office documents in Libreoffice at times because Office will not open them.