Maybe the EU is doing better than ever on some metrics, but I find it quite scary how over the last 20 years, Europe has completely missed the train on technology. We are now in a vassal position where we have to beg foreign CEOs to have some sort of view / control over the technology that runs our society. And it's not getting any better.
GDPR is too little too late, and may even be counterproductive[1]. It would have been vastly preferable to have healthy European competitors to Microsoft / Apple / Google / Facebook. But we don't, and probably will never have.
The situation with Microsoft in the 90's should have made it obvious of what was to come. Our politicians ignored it entirely. They are now making grand statements about democracy that leave me less than impressed.
[1] Some say that GDPR will cement Google / Facebook's advertising monopoly as they are in a much better position to gather data sharing consent from their users than their smaller competitors.
Missed the train? Maybe didn't fully participate in the dot-com boom or the startup-buzz, but that's not the full picture with regards to technology. The world wide web came from CERN. ARM which powers most popular mobile devices was founded in the UK (only bought by a Japanse company post-Brexit). German cars are everywhere. Nokia and Ericsson were at the forefront of the boom in mobile telecommunications. ITU is based in Geneva and GSM (the basis for all modern mobile telecomms) orginated in France (it took years for the USA to catch up).
But there's no way to way to fight back for Europe unless EU countries get even more homogeneous laws concerning running a multi-national (basically any online) business.
It's easy in the US because they have a large, wealthy and boundary free market with almost no access cost beyond marketing.
B2C is still wildly localized. In the earliest days of the commercial web (and before), this wasn't the case and it felt like a truly level playing field (the general lack of transactions involving the real world fulfillment certainly helped as well).
Only when the giants started translating their offerings to reach an even wider audience in non-anglophone countries did end users start to expect a web in their home language and the potential audience of non-anglophone-based companies dropped (because they usually address their home language first).
Now the most inhibiting cost of multi-language offerings is usually not the act of translation itself, but the resulting quality which is rarely high.
I just mean with Brexit and all ... if the English leave, English will be deprecated as an official language, yet it will still be the lingua franca of European Business. It's just a kind of a funny, and slightly ironic situation I think.
EDIT: I think actually it speaks very much to how european unity is about so much more than just the EU. By extension how culture and national identity is about so much more than what the Westphalian paradigm provides.
UK leaving EU doesn't mean it's leaving Europe. It still is and will be a huge business partner, travel destination etc. so I seriously doubt English will deprecate as an official language.
GDPR is too little too late, and may even be counterproductive[1]. It would have been vastly preferable to have healthy European competitors to Microsoft / Apple / Google / Facebook. But we don't, and probably will never have.
The situation with Microsoft in the 90's should have made it obvious of what was to come. Our politicians ignored it entirely. They are now making grand statements about democracy that leave me less than impressed.
[1] Some say that GDPR will cement Google / Facebook's advertising monopoly as they are in a much better position to gather data sharing consent from their users than their smaller competitors.