Antitrust is important, so why not pass a law that prioritizes national or European companies for critical infrastructure, even if they're more expensive? Creating a monopoly to combat another monopoly is unlikely to end well in the future.

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port11 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This seems like the most obvious solution, provided local offers aren't massively more expensive. I don't see why we wouldn't award contracts to EU companies that create jobs here, pay taxes here, and follow local regulations. We don't need a super company with a local monopoly, just to stop prioritising “as cheap as possible”.

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CGMthrowaway 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The reason why is because if they did China would retaliate and cut off cheap access to Chinese imports. That is the double edged sword of globalization the US and Europe are reckoning with today, in different ways

	▲	port11 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not really on an anti-China rhetoric, they can be a valuable partner and I think we do have a positive relationship with them. BUT, they don't need to win all public government contracts by undercutting local companies. They'd be equally upset if we did the same. I do agree that the global market is causing quite some trouble, although that could be avoided by most (all?) countries being nice to each other. Or even excellent to each other!
	▲	lukan 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"China would retaliate and cut off cheap access to Chinese imports" That still would come at a hefty price for china as that means no or way lower income for quite a lot of chinese companies and people.

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kelnos 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed. I'd think a better solution would be to ban Chinese companies from these sorts of contracts, and invest in the non-Chinese companies to help them grow. You don't need to allow monopolies to form to be successful here.