No, we need them to go away. Like the dinosaurs or the Dodo. Because competition between ad tech giants means the public is collateral damage in the ensuing war. That's because the advertiser money flows to the ad tech company that is most efficient at extracting dollars from their audience. Even a .1% increase is enough to swing the battle, and that arms race has been running since 1994 or so, the results are there for all to see.

That's because once you have a runaway success the US will tax you lower and your quality of life will be higher than what you can achieve in Europe. The USA is a great country if you're on to a winner. So the vacuum cleaner in SV tends to suck the air out of a lot of EU successful start-ups and engineering efforts simply because that's where the money is. Typical start-up valuations in the USA dwarf those in Europe, access to a single unified and mostly mono-lingual market are far more of a factor than any EU regulations, that's just a dumb meme that gets tossed around by the clueless. Yes, taxes are higher. But so is average quality of life, as opposed to average GDP, which relies on outliers.

I think I covered Seattle.

And so have Eindhoven (ASML), London (Revolut, Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo), Paris (DailyMotion, AppGratis), Berlin (Soundcloud, Mister Spex, Zalando, Helpling, Delivery Hero, Home24 and HelloFresh) and Amsterdam (Sonos (ok, technically Hilversum), Booking.com, TomTom) etc, etc. So what?

Tech companies exist the world over. The specific kind of tech company that requires a mountain of free cash and that can monopolize a whole segment is a SV anomaly and Microsoft is the exception simply because of when it started.