Item — HN Reader

>i do not like American products at all.

Why?

No doubt you'd be the first to howl should an American say "I do not like European (tech) products at all". (Well, if there were any to dislike.)

>i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.

Why not ask for the moon and the stars while you're at it? You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equivalents to "Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc" is to shut down access from anywhere in Europe to and from these companies. Do this today and tomorrow EUGoogle and EuroFacebook will appear as if out of nowhere! Why didn't Brussels (or Paris, or Berlin) think of this already?

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>* You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equivalents to "Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc" is to shut down access from anywhere in Europe to and from these companies.*

This isn’t far fetched - it’s a well understood result of Chinas Great Firewall. With American companies banned in China, Chinese companies were free to copy American firms and capture the value of the Chinese market. Protectionism has work, and even India is considering it

China is the one example where they've been able to fill the gap. All other markets have failed miserably. And even in China the goal wasn't to create better alternatives (which based on UX or privacy the 100% are not) but for the communist party to be able to control and suppress free speech.

> All other markets have failed miserably.

In Russia Yandex (search engine) and VKontakte (social network) were and still are quite successful (Google and Facebook were never banned, unlike China). And they were not created to control and/or suppress free speech (at least originally: Putin didn't care what happens in the Internet until around 2014, and it was free from censorship).