Europe, Overrun by Foreign Tech Giants, Wants to Grow Its Own

LONDON — Across the digital economy, Europe has been missing.

Apple, based in California, and Samsung, from South Korea, make the most popular phones in Europe. Facebook owns the most widely used social networks, Google dominates online search and advertising, and Amazon controls e-commerce. European companies run their businesses on cloud infrastructure from Amazon and Microsoft. The region’s wireless networks are largely made with equipment from the Chinese giant Huawei.

The European Union on Wednesday outlined an attempt to restore what officials called “technological sovereignty,” seeking tougher regulation of the world’s biggest tech platforms, new rules for artificial intelligence, and more public spending for the European tech sector.

Officials said the effort is a “generational project,” and the ideas reflect a growing concern among European leaders that countries in the region are overly dependent on services provided by companies based elsewhere. With the global economy becoming ever more centered around technology, European countries would have a harder time creating jobs and generating tax revenue to fund government services.

“We want to find European solutions in the digital age,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union that is crafting the policy, said at a news conference in Brussels.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/business/europe-digital-economy.html