Across Europe, love — or at least acceptance — often wins out in the love-hate relationship with American tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Despite their often vocal criticism of these behemoths, people in the region are some of the most active and loyal users of American social networks, search engines and e-commerce websites. They are often even more hooked on the services than Americans are.
Google now has an 85 percent market share for search in the region’s five largest economies, including Britain, France and Germany. Facebook — the target of several government investigations for its tax practices in Europe — has over 150 million European users.
American tech companies operate seven of the 10 most visited websites in Europe. Only Yandex and Mail.ru, a Russian search engine and an email site, and Axel Springer, the German publisher of Die Welt and Bild, make the list.
Nonetheless, from Spain to Sweden, many of Europe’s millions of Internet users regularly complain about the dominance of American tech companies, particularly about how their data is used and shared. It also leaves them wondering why so few homegrown tech companies are globally competitive.
For many Europeans, the likes of Twitter and Amazon hold too much information about what people do online. That wariness has only grown stronger after the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, about American intelligence agencies’ spying activities and perceived easy access to the world’s tech infrastructure.