Why there’s no European Google?

And why it is a good thing!

With some adjustments, this post is mostly a translation of a post I published in French three years ago. In light of the European Commission’s "call for evidence on Open Source," and as a professor of "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, I thought it was a good idea to translate it into English as a public answer to that call.

• Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas de Google européen ? (ploum.net)
• European Commission issues call for evidence on open source (lwn.net)

Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft. All those giants are part of our daily personal and professional lives. We may even not interact with anything else but them. All are 100% American companies.

China is not totally forgotten, with Alibaba, TikTok, and some services less popular in Europe yet used by billions worldwide.

What about European tech champions? Nearly nothing, to the great sadness of politicians who believe that the success of a society is measured by the number of billionaires it creates.

Despite having few tech-billionaires, Europe is far from ridiculous. In fact, it’s the opposite: Europe is the central place that allowed most of our tech to flourish.

The Internet, the interconnection of most of the computers in the world, has existed since the late sixties. But no protocol existed to actually exploit that network, to explore and search for information. At the time, you needed to know exactly what you wanted and where to find it. That’s why the USA tried to develop a protocol called "Gopher."

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web! It looks like the Official European Joke! (And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)

• The Official European Joke (ploum.net)

Gopher is still used by a few hobbyists (like your servitor), but it never truly became popular, except for a very short time in some parts of America. One of the reasons might have been that Gopher’s creators wanted to keep their rights to it and license any related software, unlike the European Web, which conquered the world because it was offered as a common good instead of seeking short-term profits.

While Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee were busy inventing the World Wide Web in their CERN office, a Swedish-speaking Finnish student started to code an operating system and make it available to everyone under the name "Linux." Today, Linux is probably the most popular operating system in the world. It runs on any Android smartphone, is used in most data centers, in most of your appliances, in satellites, in watches and is the operating system of choice for many of the programmers who write the code you use to run your business. Its creator, the European Linus Torvalds, is not a billionaire. And he’s very happy about it: he never wanted to become one. He continued coding and wrote the "git" software, which is probably used by 100% of the software developers around the world. Like Linux, Git is part of the common good: you can use it freely, you can modify it, you can redistribute it, you can sell it. The only thing you cannot do? Privatize it. This is called "copyleft."

In 2017, a decentralized and ethical alternative to Twitter appeared: Mastodon. Its creator? A German student, born in Russia, who had the goal of allowing social network users to leave monopolies to have humane conversations without being spied on and bombarded with advertising or pushed-by-algorithm fake news. Like Linux, like git, Mastodon is copyleft and now part of the common goods.

Allowing human-scale discussion with privacy and without advertising was also the main motivation behind the Gemini protocol (whose name has since been hijacked by Google AI). Gemini is a stripped-down version of the Web which, by design, is considered definitive. Everybody can write Gemini-related software without having to update it in the future. The goal is not to attract billions of users but to be there for those who need it, even in the distant future. The creator of the Gemini protocol wishes to remain anonymous, but we know that the project started while he was living in Finland.

I could continue with the famous VLC media player, probably the most popular media player in the world. Its creator, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Kempf, refused many offers that would have made him a very rich man. But he wanted to keep VLC a copyleft tool part of the common goods.

Don’t forget LibreOffice, the copyleft office suite maintained by hundreds of contributors around the world under the umbrella of the Document Foundation, a German institution.

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the "success culture." Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider "winning against the whole society" as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!

We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).

Google, Microsoft, Facebook may disappear tomorrow. It is even very probable that they will not exist in fourty or fifty years. It would even be a good thing. But could you imagine the world without the Web? Without HTML? Without Linux?

Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

In the media, success is often reduced to the size of a company or the bank account of its founder. Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth? What if we used usefulness and longevity? What if we gave more value to the fundamental technological infrastructure instead of the shiny new marketing gimmick used to empty naive wallets? Well, I guess that if we changed how we measure success, Europe would be incredibly successful.

And, as Europeans, we could even be proud of it. Proud of our inventions. Proud of how we contribute to the common good instead of considering ourselves American vassals.

Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?

The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

• Picture by Frans Snik of a LEGO version of the European Extremely Large Telescope. Yes, LEGO is a European invention too.

Troye Sivan has spoken candidly about struggling with body image after he was shamed by a TikToker who said he was experiencing ‘twink death’.

Sivan, 30, started a new Substack on Wednesday (21 January), the first post of which was originally titled “F*** this guy!!”. It was later renamed “feeling a bit uggo (ugly).”

It came about after a doctor – Dr. Zayn – shared a now-deleted TikTok about Sivan and how he looked “older” and like he was going through “twink death”.

It’s a term mostly used in a playful way by queer people to refer to someone previously considered a ‘twink’ (generally young, slender, and often with no body hair) who is growing out of that phase.

In the lengthy post Sivan described flitting between “feeling like I’m aging in a good way” and “feeling like Gollum’s very close pop-singing relative”. He also described feeling “somehow both skinny and fat at the same time”.

The “One Of Your Girls” singer said he’s struggled with body image “for a lot of my life”. Recognising that he’s “historically famously twinky”, Sivan said he’s transitioning out of that and is “not THAT skinny anymore”.

Reaffirming his body positive ethos, Sivan said he fluctuates between two approaches to dealing with body image pressures. The first is a healthier approach and is based around some advice he’s been given “from a person at the very top of the fashion world – ‘stay ugly’. Ie. don’t f*** with your face”.

He continued: “How cool!! When everyone else has the same nose and no wrinkles and no smile lines and filler that’s migrated all the way down to their necks, you’ll be so happy and chic and weathered and wise.”

Sivan also shared he’d been going to the gym more, eating more and tracking calories “in a way that feels less toxic than it sounds” and that he’s been getting “more muscley [sic], defined, and toned.”

The second approach is more toxic. Discussing more of his anxieties, the “Bloom” singer shared he’d had a consultation to have fat from his leg put under his eyes and been recommended botox. However, he said: “I really don’t want that frozen look,” adding: “The cracks are starting to show though.”

He then wrote: “What good is money and modern medicine if not to fix all of these flaws that this random sicko f**** plastic surgeon told me I have in an Instagram reel?” sharing Dr Zayn’s post.

He also described feeling awkward on red carpets and how he didn’t feel he looked good while attending the NGV Gala in December. Videos from that event are what Dr Zayn used to pick apart Sivan’s image.

Sivan said hearing Dr Zayn’s unsolicited advice pushed him towards getting treatments, made worse by the “all-knowing, eternally and deeply evil algorithm” which sent content about treatments to the Aussie pop star.

As to which approach would win out, Sivan advised: “Keep your eyes on my under eyes for updates.” Closing his post he put: “I’m patient with myself, and understand and respect both approaches. It’s us vs species-endingly-insatiable corporate greed, with access to addictive brainwashing technology. Good luck!!!!”

He later edited the piece to change the title and say he’d heard from Dr Zayn, who had removed the video and “sent me a really thoughtful and sweet message apologising”. Sivan signed off: “No hard feelings from my side whatsoever.”

Sivan has responded to critics of how he looks in the past telling them: “I like my body and I think that makes some people uncomfortable.”

He’s also been criticised for the lack of body diversity in the “Rush” music video. To that he said he “definitely hears the critique” but also discussed his own body image issues. “Everyone’s body is as beautiful as it is, including my own, and it just sucks to see people talking about other people’s bodies,” he said.

Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.

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