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While [the Beligian] Robert Cailliau and [British citizen] Tim Berners-Lee were busy inventing the World Wide Web in their CERN office in Switzerland, a Swedish-speaking Finnish student started to code an operating system and make it available to everyone under the name “Linux.” Today, Linux is probably the most popular operating system in the world. It runs on any Android smartphone, is used in most data centers, in most of your appliances, in satellites, in watches and is the operating system of choice for many of the programmers who write the code you use to run your business. Its creator, the European Linus Torvalds, is not a billionaire. And he’s very happy about it: he never wanted to become one. He continued coding and wrote the “git” software, which is probably used by 100% of the software developers around the world. Like Linux, Git is part of the common good: you can use it freely, you can modify it, you can redistribute it, you can sell it. The only thing you cannot do? Privatize it. This is called “copyleft.”
In 2017, a decentralized and ethical alternative to Twitter appeared: Mastodon. Its creator? A German student, born in Russia, who had the goal of allowing social network users to leave monopolies to have humane conversations without being spied on and bombarded with advertising or pushed-by-algorithm fake news. Like Linux, like git, Mastodon is copyleft and now part of the common goods.
Allowing human-scale discussion with privacy and without advertising was also the main motivation behind the Gemini protocol (whose name has since been hijacked by Google AI). Gemini is a stripped-down version of the Web which, by design, is considered definitive. Everybody can write Gemini-related software without having to update it in the future. The goal is not to attract billions of users but to be there for those who need it, even in the distant future. The creator of the Gemini protocol wishes to remain anonymous, but we know that the project started while he was living in Finland.
I could continue with the famous VLC media player, probably the most popular media player in the world. Its creator, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Kempf, refused many offers that would have made him a very rich man. But he wanted to keep VLC a copyleft tool part of the common goods.
Don’t forget LibreOffice, the copyleft office suite maintained by hundreds of contributors around the world under the umbrella of the Document Foundation, a German institution.
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We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the “success culture.” Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider “winning against the whole society” as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!
We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).
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Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?
The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.
Ok, so when we talk about more integration on EU level, in order to establish “success culture” - what kind of integration are we talking about?
Even on EU level, we’re 27 sovereign states, with many different languages, currencies and most importantly cultures. It’s not really even remotely analogous to current day USA.
Yes there are different languages and cultures in Europe; I don’t want to diminish those. Integration between European countries is still possible though. Look at Airbus, which is registered as a “Societas Europaea” (European company), and which has manufacturing facilities in multiple European countries. Airbus is one of the leading global companies in aviation. Maybe one day Europe will have some big tech companies with offices across Europe. Currently there are companies like Spotify and SAP but of course they’re not as big as Google, Microsoft, or Tencent in China, etc.
So let me get this right? In order to “feel European” we need to have huge tech companies that aim to dominate the global market so we can all feel proud when we see their office logotypes in all the cities we visit?
That’s the vibe of the “success culture” we want to build?
Should be easy, just allow monopolies and let companies gobble up their competition without question. Weaken worker power and agency and then fail to regulate interoperability and bang, we have our own tech giants as well.
Let me expand on this a bit:
Monopolies / lack of competition — When platforms dominate markets, they no longer fear losing users or business customers to rivals, which emboldens them to degrade quality.
Weak worker power / agency — Tech workers once had leverage to resist harmful design or policy choices; as layoffs and labor fragmentation eroded that leverage, platforms faced fewer internal pressures to restrain “enshittifying” moves.
Erosion of regulation and interoperability — Regulatory bodies have been captured or weakened, and technical constraints (like the ability for third parties to interoperate or fix products) have been removed or outlawed. Without strong regulation or the ability for users and competitors to interoperate, platforms can enforce lock-in and extract more value without consequence.
This is what we’ve come to call “enshittification” and it’s the trademark of all the major platforms you mentioned. If this is what you want from “Europe” then just let me get off this “success train” before it leaves the station.
I don’t want monopolies or enshittification. I think it would be good though to have a European tech sector which can meet Europe’s needs, instead of companies and governments in Europe relying on Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. The (now more unpredictable) US government could compel those companies to give info from European government customers to US authorities, for example. I read a story about this the other day: “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam’s clouds and go EU-native”.
Europe has a tech sector. But instead of feudalistic, large"European" services, I think it would be great to have plenty of smaller national tech service sectors that would serve the needs of their respective markets, near those markets. The tech service market doesn’t have to be European for any other sense than being open for competition (since we have freedom of labor within the union). There are plenty of local cloud (IaaS/SaaS) providers in most European countries, but it’s hard to compete against global monopolies, be it global, American or just EU-wide. We should have strong laws and political lobbying against that - so if EU wanted to be useful, it could try to hinder these companies from operating within the EU market and prohibit new ones forming in EU. But this seems to be quite hard in our - very broken - “European democracy” (and by that I mean EU Parliament).
And establishing a healthy, innovating tech service sector only gets the ball rolling - the real problem in tech sector is chip manufacturing and access to raw materials. I think that’s hard to solve without reliance on China.
There are problems to solve. But I don’t think solution to any of them is “let’s import U.S success culture”. or “let’s have European big tech companies”. We need different models.