Europeans spending 2 hours a day on Facebook on the phone, buying an iPhone, buying Chinese crap on Amazon, and seeing ads in Google search isn't going to make the EU more technologically advanced.
The EU lacks the demographics to compete in new fields; it's about maintaining what it has.
Technological improvements are disproportionally biased over things that don't improve anybody's lives.
It takes ages before those improvements actually impact life expectancy or making life easier for human beings, and if you dig enough, you'll see companies from Europe and elsewhere innovating in that space (like CRISPR therapeutics etc)
Paris turning it into into a cylcing city is probably medically better then anything google ever did. It will have effect on all other French cites, as it always does with Paris.
Those kinds of changes have far larger impact that anything related to what most tech companies do.
I don't really care that Europe isn't leading in Self-Driving cars or Air-tax or whatever the latest investor dream is.
The reality is we already have the technology to solve most of the major issues in regards to climate change and health.
