> This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.

Because the US had so much venture capital, during the time of the low interest rates it was basically free money so they could afford to throw it to the wall and see what sticks. 90% of them would sink but it didn't matter. That doesn't fly here.

Then, they used that money to subsidise adoption, and then once the users were hooked into rent extraction as the OP mentioned. We call this process enshittification these days, and it's a really predatory business practice.

European companies don't do that as much because we have more guardrails against it, and more importantly we didn't have random cash sloshing up the walls. American could do that especially because of the petrodollar. Once the dollar loses its international status it will be a lot harder to do (and it already is due to the rising interest rates).

It was no surprise that exactly with the rising interest rates all the companies started tightening up their subscriptions. Netflix, amazon, all exploding in cost and introducing ads. Same with meta's platforms.