A recent opinion piece claimed that "when it comes to regulating the Internet, Europe is leaving the United States in the dust, and that's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future." Conversely, we can note that when it comes to using the internet for innovation and economic growth, the United States is leaving Europe in the dust, and that is also unlikely to change.
A few numbers highlight the problem. Company age is an indicator of economic dynamism—the ability to shift to new sources of income creation. The four largest European companies are more than a century old. The four largest American companies are less than 25 years old, and all are tech companies. Unicorns—startups valued at a billion dollars or more—are the engines of economic growth for the twenty-first century. The number of unicorns is a good predictor for national economic success. The United States has more than 400; the European Union has 132. Israel, with a population one-fiftieth the size of the European Union, has 94. The EU decision to regulate the tech industry in the 1990s cost it years of economic growth. Between 2008 and 2018, the United States’ real growth was 19 percent, Europe's somewhat more than 11 percent. This is trillions of dollars of lost income for Europe.
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