this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Buy European
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See, this could do something, far beyond what a grassroots boycott can.
However, I have low trust that the way forward on this is dumping money on local competitors. The reality of it is you can't build a new Amazon where Amazon already exists, you need to remove the anticompetitive foreign agents before you can prop up homegrown ones. There WERE Facebook-like European competitors before Facebook wrecked them. There ARE Amazon alternatives that work just as well in places where Amazon hasn't encroached its insane web of fully owned logistics.
You want to create a European tech alternative? Start enforcing digital antitrust. Not fines, break-ups and forced sales of local branches. If the US can do it to Tiktok the EU can do it to Meta, Amazon, Google and the like.
100%.
Thx for saying it. And that's so much not limited to tech...
Everyday, I look at our French 'exception culturelle' with some kind of respect. It's a law that make it so small bookshops have not been destroyed by Amazon (Amazon is forced to sell books at the exact same price as your local shop) and which, among many other things, make it so it's mandatory to have 30% or so of local/French content in main media. That's a great law and because it's a great law, I wonder for how much longer it will hold against the US endless appetite and against the voracity of many here in the EU too that are more than willing to fill their pockets in the process of killing and burying local cultural productions.