u/Wulfrinnan

A big part of the industrial revolution was every country with the capacity to do so setting up their own car companies, their own industries, and building things for themselves. It was hard, difficult, expensive, but it allowed them to build their own economies up and not just be dependent forever on the big first movers.

China has followed exactly that approach with big tech, partnering with American companies just enough to learn how they operate, but building their own competitors and equivalents.

There is no good reason that smaller countries could not do this. Each country could have their own version of facebook, or a national version of google, or their own software companies, and they could be entirely viable without needing an American or global market, and honestly the competition from that would be extremely good for consumers, competition, and actual innovation.

We don't all need to be plugged into either Microsoft or Apple for everything, and this idea that every tech product must be some global fire-sale diverts investment away from what should be a major engine of economic growth within all developed economies.

Update: Economies of Scale exist for physical products. In many previous eras it would have been objectively more 'efficient' to buy from the first movers and early monopolies. The entire gilded age of monopolies (that required major political reform efforts and laws to be enacted to stop) was was built on physical products. Big Tech is not categorically special here. Nor is its global use as frictionless as many of these responses imply. There are language barriers, legal barriers, and even physical infrastructure barriers to its deployment in many places. Yes, it is even easier to monopolise, and even easier to make the case 'just pay the rents to the CEO over there' with these products than with physical items, but this is not a magical new reality, it's a political and economic choice.