Europe Regulates the Gate While Others Build the Next Door

The real competitor to Google was never the European search choice screen.

It was ChatGPT.

That single fact explains more about Europe’s technological weakness than most policy papers.

The search choice screen was the bureaucratic answer to platform power. Google is dominant. Smaller search engines need visibility. Users should be presented with alternatives. So a box appears. Google is moved around. DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Brave Search and a few others are placed in front of the user.

The theory is neat.

The result is mostly friction.

Most people still choose Google because Google still works better for most people. A regulator can place DuckDuckGo on a list. It cannot make DuckDuckGo Google.

Then AI arrived.

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and other AI systems began changing how people search, ask, compare, summarize and think. Suddenly Google was not challenged by a better position in a European compliance screen. It was challenged by a new behavior.

That is real competition.

Not access arranged from above. Not a market structure imagined in Brussels. A technical breakthrough that changes what users actually do.

Bureaucracy creates choice screens. Technology creates alternatives.

Europe keeps confusing the two.

Markets Are Not Essays

The European mistake begins with a flattering assumption: that intelligent people in institutions can understand a market from above and improve it through design.

They define the gatekeeper. They define fairness. They define access. They define obligations. Then they force the world to operate inside that model.

This can sound reasonable. Markets are not morally perfect. Large companies abuse power. Defaults matter. Distribution matters. Network effects matter. Consumers do not always behave like rational angels floating through transparent information.

So yes, there is a role for government.

But the danger is that bureaucracy starts believing it is smarter than the market.

It forgets that a market is not a theory. It is a feedback system.

Consumers choose, pay, complain, leave, return, recommend, ignore, adopt and abandon. Capital flows. Builders test. Products fail. New categories appear. Old monopolies become vulnerable in ways regulators did not predict.

A bureaucrat models reality. A market tests it.

That does not make companies morally superior. They are not. It means companies operate closer to consequences. If the product is bad, people leave. If the price is wrong, demand changes. If a new technology creates more value, behavior shifts.

A bureaucracy is more insulated. It does not experience product truth directly. It experiences categories, reports, hearings, enforcement frameworks and political incentives.

That distance matters.

Especially in technology, where the next competitor rarely looks like the current market map.

The Real Competitor Is Disruption

Google’s real competitor did not come from the DMA.

It came from a different way of finding information.

Apple’s real competitor will not be a legally forced alternative Siri with awkward access to iPhone functions. It will be another agent, platform or device that becomes so useful, so trusted, or so native to human behavior that people move voluntarily.

That is how markets actually change.

A regulator can redistribute access inside the old world. A builder can create a new world.

This is why the DMA feels so limited. It tries to make existing platforms behave as if the next market already exists. It assumes the regulator can identify the relevant gate, open it, and thereby create competition.

But the most important technological changes do not happen that way.

The next door is often invisible to the people regulating the current gate.

Search looked unbeatable. Then AI made asking more useful than searching for many tasks.

Taxis looked protected. Then smartphones changed dispatch.

Hotels looked like physical infrastructure. Then Airbnb turned spare rooms into supply.

Software looked like packaged applications. Then cloud subscriptions changed distribution.

Media looked like broadcast and print. Then social feeds and creators changed attention.

The regulator usually arrives after the new reality is already obvious.

The builder arrives before.

Milei and the Discipline of Reality

This is why Javier Milei is relevant to the European technology debate.

Not because Argentina is a simple model for Europe. It is not. Argentina is messy, painful and politically extreme in ways Europe is not. Milei’s program has real social costs, and no serious person should pretend that chainsaw politics is a clean template for every society.

But Milei understands one thing that Brussels often forgets: reality is not produced by administrative intelligence.

It is discovered through consequences.

Argentina spent decades trapped in political fiction: deficits without consequences, money printing without honesty, subsidies without discipline, state expansion without productivity, promises without arithmetic. Inflation was not an accident. It was reality pushing back against a system that kept lying.

Milei’s central insight is brutal but simple: stop lying.

Inflation does not fall because a ministry describes it better. It falls when the monetary and fiscal machine stops producing the conditions that create inflation. You cannot regulate away arithmetic. You cannot subsidize away scarcity forever. You cannot bureaucratically declare prosperity into existence.

At some point, reality collects.

Technology works the same way.

Innovation does not appear because a regulator defines a fairer market structure. It appears when builders are allowed to test dangerous ideas against real customers, real capital, real failure and real demand.

A bureaucrat can theorize competition.

A market discovers it.

Europe Wants Sovereignty Without the Machinery of Sovereignty

Europe says it wants digital sovereignty.

It wants independence from American platforms. It wants its own AI, its own cloud, its own chips, its own battery industry, its own industrial base, its own strategic autonomy. It wants not to depend on Silicon Valley or China.

The ambition is right.

The method is wrong.

Sovereignty is not produced by declarations. It is produced by builders.

It requires capital, speed, risk, failure, scale, energy, talent and permission to become uncomfortably successful. It requires a culture where a company with an 80 percent chance of failure can still raise serious money because the 20 percent chance might change the world.

In the United States, that logic is normal.

In Europe, it often feels irresponsible.

A startup must be too proven before it is properly funded. A technology must be too safe before it is allowed to scale. A company must be too polite before it is allowed to become dominant. The result is predictable: Europe produces talent, research, taste and regulation. America produces platforms. China copies, scales and industrializes.

Europe gets the toys later, wrapped in compliance.

There are exceptions. Mistral matters. ASML matters. European battery, energy, robotics and industrial technology companies matter. But the exceptions prove the point. They are not yet the natural output of a system designed for scale. They are rare victories inside a culture that still distrusts the forces that produce victory.

Europe wants sovereignty, but it fears the machinery of sovereignty.

It fears capital concentration. It fears aggressive growth. It fears failure. It fears winners. It fears the mess of the market.

So it reaches for what it knows: regulation.

The Bureaucratic Temptation

The DMA is not just a law. It is a temperament.

It sees power and asks how to restrain it. That is not always wrong. Power should be checked. But if restraint becomes the main instinct, the continent slowly forgets how to build.

Europe looks at Apple and says: gatekeeper.

It looks at Google and says: gatekeeper.

It looks at platform power and says: obligations, access, fairness, interoperability, compliance.

But the deeper question should be: why did Europe not build more of these companies itself?

Why is the continent regulating the platforms it wishes it had created?

If Europe wants independence from American technology, forcing Apple to redesign parts of the iPhone will not be enough. It may even make European users wait longer for the best products while doing little to create European alternatives.

The real answer is harder.

Make risk capital abundant. Make energy cheap and available. Make it easier to hire, fire, build, test and scale. Make regulation faster, narrower and more technically literate. Fund deep tech with serious ambition. Allow failure without moral panic. Allow success without immediate suspicion. Let Mistral-scale companies become normal, not miraculous.

Do not try to decide what the market should want.

Create the conditions under which the market can surprise you.

Stop Simulating the Market

The fatal bureaucratic error is the belief that a regulator can simulate market intelligence from above.

It cannot.

A regulator can set boundaries. It can punish fraud. It can enforce transparency. It can protect property rights. It can stop coercion, deception and abuse. It can make sure competition is not killed through illegal contracts or corrupt capture.

But it cannot decide which product should win.

It cannot know in advance which interface consumers will trust, which AI model will matter, which device form factor will emerge, which search behavior will disappear, or which startup will become the next platform.

That knowledge does not exist yet.

It has to be discovered.

The European project too often tries to have an opinion about the future before the future has been tested. It looks at the current market and tries to correct it according to a theory of fairness. But by the time the correction arrives, the real competition may be coming from somewhere else entirely.

The choice screen did not weaken Google.

AI did.

That should humble every regulator in Europe.

Dependency With Paperwork

Europe’s tragedy is not that it lacks values. Europe has many of the right values: privacy, dignity, pluralism, safety, human rights, social trust, restraint, democratic legitimacy.

The tragedy is that Europe often mistakes regulation for creation.

It wants the fruits of innovation without fully trusting the conditions that produce innovation. It wants technological sovereignty without the chaos of technological capitalism. It wants champions without letting companies become too powerful. It wants safety before speed, fairness before discovery, and consensus before reality has spoken.

So the pattern repeats.

America builds. China copies and scales. Europe regulates the conditions under which it may safely receive the result.

That is not sovereignty.

That is dependency with paperwork.

And it will not be solved by another act, another framework, another definition of gatekeeper, another compliance screen, or another institutional belief that the market can be improved by people standing above it.

Europe does not need to abandon regulation. That would be naive.

But it needs to recover humility.

The state is not smarter than reality. The bureaucrat is not closer to truth than the builder. The market is not perfect, but it is alive.

If Europe wants independence from American platforms, it should stop trying to redesign Apple and start making room for the next Apple.

If Europe wants AI sovereignty, it should not merely regulate OpenAI, Google and Apple. It should create the conditions under which European builders can make them obsolete.

If Europe wants the future, it has to stop standing on the hill, describing the valley.

It has to let people build.