Yeah well that's why the EU federal idea is and will be a failure. It wishes to be the challenger to the US and China hegemony in theory, but then every individual country wants to be its own special mini-boss in its own playground hoping they'll be at the top of the helm, that develops and uses its own separate things that will hopefully get adopted by the other EU members.

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nutjob2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You have it in reverse. A federal EU enables EU countries to pool sovereignty and strength to protect itself from the US and China. It neither needs to or wants to challenge anyone. A federal system allows EU wide decisions to be made quickly and without petty parochial concerns.

Constituent states rightly can choose to make their own decisions in matters like this, it hardly effects anyone else, and they can choose to collaborate.

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cgio 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is that why US failed while building CP/m, Unix a few, Dos, Windows, MacOs, OS/2,…? A successful market does not impose monopolies. The more, the merrier.

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PorciiVorbesc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> A successful market does not impose monopolies. The more, the merrier.

Yeah but when it comes to national sovereignty you can't let your own products get steamrolled by the entrenched monopolies of your adversaries (Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc) just because you're gullible and still think you can play by the rules of idealistic 'free market' and come out on top, while your adversaries protect their monopolies to weaponize them against you on the "free market", suppressing or destroying your domestic industry and making you indefinitely dependent on them (US big-tech, Chinese EV industry, etc).

China has achieved a SW industry superior to the EU with much less money, simply because it has banned US big-tech from its market, preventing its own small domestic players from being crushed by US giants. It's also how countries like Italy, Japan and Korea built strong car industries post-WW2, as they banned superior import cars (often US ones) from their markets, till their own industry could catch up and be competitive internationally. India does the same.

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toyg an hour ago | parent [-]

Cooperation and competition can be partial. Google and Microsoft compete internally and then cooperate when fighting external forces. There is no reason why this cannot work for European companies too.

The problem has more to do with the weak sense of belonging to a supranational identity. Californians and New Yorkers both identify as Americans before they identify as members of their home state; the opposite is true of most Europeans still. Change is slow.

	▲	PorciiVorbesc 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Californians and New Yorkers both identify as Americans before they identify as members of their home state; the opposite is true of most Europeans still. You don't need to completely erase and crush ethnic and national identities in order to standardize on technical platform for the common market.

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azan_ an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

When the market is as huge as US, there's lots of space for competition. Sadly in how EU is currently structured it would most likely be just german "Microsoft", spanish "Microsoft", french "Microsoft" etc.