Europe's plan for a tech giant keeps stalling over funding

Europe wants its own tech giant and has no idea how to pay for it

A homegrown operating system, a search engine, secure email, a social network that ties it all together. The proposal to build a major European tech conglomerate capable of taking on the US giants is back on the table with a textbook promise: a boost of up to 30% to the continent's GDP in a single year. The diagnosis behind it is blunt: without digital sovereignty there is no economic sovereignty, and Europe has been ceding ground for decades. The problem appears when you ask who will do it, with what money, and under what rules.

What the plan actually calls for

The original proposal lists five pieces: a desktop operating system, a mobile operating system, a search engine, free email, and an all-in-one social network combining image, video and text in a single interface with built-in messaging. The idea is a mass-market product, "ing perfect", that wins on quality rather than by decree. And that it be developed now, without waiting for consensus that never comes.

The calculation attached to the proposal — a 30% GDP increase in twelve months — comes with no breakdown. Nor with any investment estimate. It is the kind of figure that sounds great in a headline and deflates at the first serious analysis.

The precedent nobody wants to repeat: Renfe

The most common objection is not ideological, it is empirical. Anyone who has worked with public procurement says it plainly: if software is commissioned from the public sector through contracts, the result will be a Renfe-type product. The website of Spain's state railway operator is used as a recurring example of what happens when interface, usability and maintenance are subordinated to the tender specifications.

The counterargument comes from Asia. China develops digital infrastructure with a mix of public and private companies, and WeChat — owned by Tencent, not state-run — has been years ahead of WhatsApp in micropayments and integrated services. The difference is not public versus private, but the existence of a huge internal market, clear rules and a strategy sustained over time.

The European alternatives already exist, but nobody uses them

There is European software. Zorin OS (Ireland), SUSE (Germany), Ubuntu (Canonical, UK), Proton Mail, alternative search engines, Android-based mobile systems without Google services. The problem is not the supply: it is adoption. Nobody switches from Excel to a clone, however good it is, while the rest of the world keeps using Excel.

The real barrier is the network effect. An operating system does not compete on antiestéticatures, it competes on compatibility. And there, individual users have no incentive to move as long as institutions, companies and schools keep sending files in proprietary formats.

The race that really matters: AI

While the European search engine is being debated, the race that will define the next decade is artificial intelligence. Cloning software has become trivially cheap: there are clones of word processors and design tools that work as well as or better than the originals. The competitive advantage no longer lies in the application, it lies in the model and the data.

Europe regulates a lot and produces little in this field. The gap is not closed with a pretty email service, it is closed with investment in computing power, talent and a single digital market that today remains fragmented across twenty-seven legal systems.

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The discussion ends where it usually ends: everyone agrees Europe is late, nobody agrees on who pays the bill for being less late. And in the meantime, the Renfe website still takes just as long to load.