This is what happens when you rely on American tech companies. Apple is pulling shit with Europe, the home of “civilisation”, that feels like it’s straight out of a stupid reality show over regulations regarding sideloading and privacy. And clowns like this will regurgigate the dumbest and the most worn-out libertarian shit in first tier media outlets.
Tbh I don’t get the point behind GDPR. Is it genuinely meant to ensure privacy to some extent or is it just some form of protectionism against American tech companies?
And how many of those companies rely on US digital infrastructure and US platforms?
I’m not sure what point you’re making ?
I would expect them have multiple infrastructure dependencies, locally and in the US. I would also expect the reverse to be true : the US companies will have in country dependencies wherever they operate. They do not own the internet. The internet is not reliant on them to function - it was specifically design not too.
I’m not talking about physical infrastructure, and the handful of European companies/brands you mentioned are small fish compared with the US giants. Yes a lot of Europeans work in tech, but the vast majority of them rely on US products to do so, and a good chunk of them work in European subsidiaries of US companies.
The point i’m making is that Europeans for the most part rely on digital monopolies controlled by the US which are subject to the whims of the US government and which co-operate with and are also to varying degrees infiltrated by the US intelligence agencies and the national security state. This gives the US government a lot of control over an important sector of your economy, not to mention a direct pipeline to the minds of your citizens.
A sovereign state would see this digital colonization by another country’s monopolies as a serious national security threat. China for example made sure that Chinese citizens predominantly use Chinese social media platforms instead of allowing them to become dependent on the US’s. But as another commenter pointed out, Europe is not sovereign, it is a collection of US vassals.