One can wonder how valuable these companies really are. Yes, they're valuable to investors, but the investors of Facebook are not American, they're completely international. The return on investment on capital investment flows to investors worldwide, not just US investors because it's a US company.

So what else then... Taxes, here tech companies are notorious. Stories of FB paying a few thousand in total taxes in the UK, Apple leaving its cash abroad to avoid taxation, Google channeling its revenues through a royalty-scheme between Ireland and the Netherlands that goes virtually untaxed (Dutch Sandwich) etc... tax wise these companies contribute little to the place of their main business (e.g. the US for the above three companies).

Then, employment? Here too, tech companies are known for providing relatively little employment compared to the size of the business, versus other industries. To take an extreme example, walmart (a company which pulls the vast majority of its revenues from the US alone) has up til recently had more store locations, than FB has employees. FB doesn't even have 12k employees, Walmart has literally a couple million. The article mentions Whatsapp as an example, it just had 55 employees when it was sold for almost $20b Compare that with say Vente Privee, a French online retailer that has 2500 employees and close to $2b in revenue and a slightly higher valuation, that nobody talks about. Which would you rather have in your country, creating jobs? You may still (likely) say Whatsapp, but it wouldn't be an obvious answer. Instagram is similar, 18 employees, who cares whether they're in the US or not? It's a meaningless figure for employment alone. And again, ownership wise the billion dollar valued company is in the hands of international investors, and tax wise it's likely little to nothing.

So what's the contribution of these US companies to the US then? What is Europe really missing? It profits from all the international innovations (I happily use Google's services), while it taxes the above companies for doing business in the EU.

If tech was shitty in Europe, sure, all of this would be alarming. But we have great research (e.g. hadron collider), IT/ICT infrastructure is very solid, if I look at my own country we have digitised and modernised everything from insurance to banking to tax filings, at the supermarket I pay via NFC, as I do in a bus, metro, train or tram. I don't live in some outdated world without technology.

There are very obvious counterarguments to make... in particular political and cultural control and influence that large companies like Google have and the power that wields, that Europe thereby doesn't have, can be or become an issue. Reinventing our own industries the next few decades without inspiring tech companies, is trickier. Seeing talent trained at great European universities with great startup ideas fly to the US for various reasons, is an issue. I appreciate all of that, and yet I feel the importance of companies like FB's contributions to the US as opposed to the rest of the world, is overstated, and that we're not missing out all that much by not having a European FB, for example.

At the end of the day there are 3 superlarge markets, the US, Europe and China. Then a number of very large ones like India or Japan. But of those first three, the EU is merely a partial economic, political and legal union, with a wide range of languages, laws, cultures and systems. While the US and China certainly have internal diversity, it's nothing like the EU. It's why we have tons of companies with a few billion dollar valuations, that capture a substantial portion of the EU but far from all of it. The biggest first language market in the EU is German, and it stands at 18% of the EU as a first language, see what I mean? In the US or China, you can pretty much roll out tech products nationally in many cases, not without any friction, but in a way that's much more natural than in the EU. That doesn't mean tech sucks here, that we have little value, no jobs or shitty digital/online services, it's just fine here (find me digital/online services that the US has that we simply don't have access to, that's missing in EU markets completely), but we have fewer ultralarge unicorns like Google or Facebook, and I'm not all that convinced that this is as big a problem as it's made out to be.