Comment by bflesch
1 month ago
US tech companies are taking up middlemen roles to extract wealth from developed nations, while not adding a lot of value on their own. Their moat is not that big, and there are mature viable alternatives.
One does not need google in their lives to be exposed to advertisements to a local brand. Or pay a percentage fee to paypal or visa if you buy a local product.
US tech companies lose much more from a decoupling than Europe does.
It depends on more than just that. Mindshare, network effects, and the state of a technological art all matter.
The moat crossing isn't in competing with the likes of Google or Paypal directly. The moat crossing is in accumulating enough capital to build the thing that leapfrogs them. Being a middleman allows you to accumulate a lot of money while expending fairly little of it. Then, you focus on the next thing, be it AI or whatever, while collecting middleman fees.
This has a collective effect on a nation's economy. You could tell the American companies to go kick rocks and develop your own local alternatives, but then you're expending your capital on developing a local alternative, not developing the Next Big Thing (TM), and the Americans are. The risk is that your economy becomes less competitive overall while becoming more competitive with one segment of the American economy.
On the other hand, you can’t develop a technology if you have no knowledge of its inner workings.
This is an issue the US finds itself in now as it tries to onshore manufacturing again after allowing someone else to play middle man for decades.
Yes, the US has plenty of capital resources but that doesn’t directly translate into production when you have to setup not just a single factory but an entire supply chain.
Arguments in favor of US politics which are based on "mature markets" and "capital" have become extremely weak since they started dismantling Fed autonomy and used ChatGPT to roll the dice on random tariffs.
It doesn't help that the clever talking heads behind US "capital" such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks have outed themselves as complete and utter morons.
If they are not adding any value, then the content companies can decline to be indexed. They have always had that right, but they do not exercise it which is a clear signal that indexing adds value. So they are getting a service that adds value for free, and not only are they not grateful for that, they are actually so greedy that they want Google to pay them.