this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Look... Doesn't that feel kind of like self-pitying rot to anyone here? Why are we dependent on US technology? Because we are so ethical and pure...
Here's the truth.
In the late 90s, a German student created a search engine in Germany. It was a little thing. It only scraped a few hundred media outlets. You signed up, defined some keywords, and when an article matching those keywords was published, you received a notification.
He immediately was sued and forced to shut down under copyright law. Google could operate in the US under Fair Use.
Eventually, years later search engines were legalized in Germany (and the EU). But by then the Internet was dominated by US companies. It makes no sense to spend billions to build a European Google that does exactly what Google already does.
The reason that there is no European Google is that we insist that information must be owned. No data processing without the explicit consent of the owner. Which means, we insist that some intellectual property owners should be allowed to extract rent from us all.