This software imbalance is partially created by the fundamental inequalities contract+IP law creates. Since it grants not just remuneration for the creative, but also control, it's really, really easy to abuse economies of scale, and software is one big capitalist failure in that regard - it's not competitiive at all; one barrier to entry and network effect after the other.

And whereas we by now have e.g. laws that allow transferring (say) a telephone number from one provider to the next; we do not yet have similar protections for the digital equivalents. Want to transfer your facebook account - as in the live account, connections & address & all, not the old data - to a new provider? Good luck with that (frankly, even the data isn't transferable, because the export format isn't an commonly used standard). Want to replace your gmail account with something else? Or, to play on recent events - want to transfer your .org registration to some place not being defrauded by ICANN insiders? All of that's hopeless.

People sometimes claim there are technical difficulties here, but while those are real - they're not the cause for all this lock in. If the alternative to account transferability were bankruptcy, you can bet the big players would have this solved in about next to no time at all; but as it is - the incentives are to suppress competition and leverage the ill-gotten gains from being an early moving and having access to a large, single-language market.

This is also why I'm not so sure china's rise is actually a bad thing - even for the US. The US economy is essentially stagnant; there needs to be a shake-up rather than resting on laurels. IP law currently is less of an incentive to create, and more theft of the commons - the benefits to the private interests are completely out of whack with the costs imposed on society. A country that won't entirely bow to the absurdities of IP law might inspire others for entirely selfish reasons to follow suit - and that might eventually cause the IP oligopoly to crack, and inject more actual dynamism and creativity. Make no mistake, I'm not suggesting china is being nice or anything - it's just that if we're lucky the collateral damage may fall for once in a beneficial direction. Of course, we might not be so lucky, but hey...

If Europe really wants to compete, it should take a look around and adopt a similar less protective stance. France's tax is the wrong direction - instead of taxing the giants, we should break their market power, and prioritize things like flexibility to reassign a facebook account over the trademark holders right to keep the facebook name in house. Copyright should be restrained to FRAND principles, and e.g. not be a way to prevent a competitor from competing (i.e. the oracle vs google api fight) - and perhaps changed fundamentally to discourage rent-seeking where the value of a copyright lies to a significant extent in the network effect, not the actual content (which is pretty often the case, e.g. for shared cultural history like music too).

The deck is fundamentally and anti-competitively stacked; there' little chance of fighting via innovation when there's no way to compete even with innovations.

Obviously, anti-competitive tendencies are just as strong in Europe or China as they are in the US. But given the self-interest in breaking the US IP-backed rent-seekers, and the coinciding (and politically acknowledged) threat of democracy-undermining social bubbles there's a chance for a least some baby-steps towards change.