The EU can legislate to protect their people from FAANG because these companies do not have Carnegie level monopolistic influence like in the USA. I'm not sure of imperialism, but in congress, the more well-funded candidate wins over 90% of the time. Lobbying is also a legalized system of first world bribery, people talk about "taking the money out of politics", but it has always been this way. Money is a portable form of power, and it is fuel to political machines.

In fact, the Invesco QQQ Trust Series I fund, which tracks the top 100 nonfinancial public domestic and international corporations in the NASDAQ, is heavily dominated by tech. Of the top 10 holdings, 9/10 are tech companies, with the remainder being Costco. In the information economy, these companies have taken the place of the steel, oil, and railroad giants of the 20th century. Instead of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, we have had Jobs, Page, Zuckerberg, and others. Of course this is a rotating cast, but the idea is the same.

So yes, accessing interconnectivity via the internet is more important to Europeans than the corrupted legislation of the US, but it's not like they don't have their own problems. Especially in regards to energy and the current conflict in Eastern Europe. The petrodollar is what props up the US economy, if Western Europe buys energy in anything other than US dollars, then our government cannot continue vigorously printing money without Weimar levels of inflation. That is really where imperialism comes into play, it props up the economy of Western Europe.

I agree that the ideas of exploration, self-education, and the drive of the individual is important to the Western and especially American tradition of technological innovation. In terms of individual empowerment, we also have the ability to delete social media accounts, to boycott companies like Amazon, and to use alternative search engines. In many cases, it is not a preference but a necessity to use an engine besides Google to sift through SEO optimized content and find the information I'm looking for.

This is in response to you and this article, because the narrative of Western decline is peddled so enthusiastically that it brings itself under scrutiny. If it was such a self-evident truth, then why does it have to be constantly pushed on us via mass media, via Wall Street billionaires, via foreign propagandists? Because it is a lie, it is a lie that serves the international ruling class, a global alliance of ultra wealthy oligarchs that are betting against their own people.

Yes, this has little to do with open source, but honestly this article has little to do with open source. It attempts to paint a historical narrative, which is the bread and butter of historically effective propaganda. To touch on this topic as this article has, open source and Linux in particular is great for circumventing tech monopolies like Microsoft and gaining full control and privacy over a machine that you own outright.

Similarly, boycotting tech giants, Amazon included, improves individual quality of life as well as living conditions for the entire nation. That is individual empowerment, speaking truth to power and making conscience decisions with your attention and consumption. Unless another Teddy Roosevelt comes along to bust up our tech monopolies and reign in the political influence of extreme wealth, this is really our only recourse to turn the tides and bring back real innovation.

That is what we need, real innovation, not frantic bids to explore and capture "data as oil" drilling sites. Innovation triumphs over brute force and human subjugation every time. That's what we need not just to protect our livelihoods, but to push the progress of humanity forward. Hewlett Packard, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, was not built on brainstorming ways to addict people to content aggregators and harvest their data.

It was bold ideas, real intellectual labor and not just psychological exploitation. Above all, technological innovation that contributed to the overall lives of mankind as a whole. It wasn't about exploiting, controlling, taking, but exploring, building, and contributing. That's the core idea of open source, passion and freedom. This is really at the core of the hacker ethos, freedom for the sake of freedom and innovation for the sake of wonder. The end result is a more free and open society. At the intersection of capital, the end result is an economy based on improvement and not exploitation. One is sustainable, the other is not.