There's a few pretty important European (and EU) companies on the internet.

On my phone I have:

the Ecosia search engine (based in Germany, it plants trees every x times I search something), Bolt (in Estonia, basically a cooler Uber with scooters), TooGoodToGo (Denmark, it lets me find good deals for food that would otherwise be thrown away), Spotify (Sweden) and Deezer (France, but American majority stake), I have a few travelling apps like Booking.com (from the Netherlands), Trivago (German but American-majority stake) and Skyscanner (from Ireland but the majority stake is Chinese) and my antivirus is from a pretty big European company while my banking app is a European start-up (but I'm not gonna share them online for security concerns!). There's also the Reuters and Ryanair app, but they did not start as digital companies.

And those are the apps I currently have on my phone, there's a lot more that I don't have - this is the first time I check my apps' countries of origin. I know Supercell is Finnish, Vinted is Lithuanian. There's also certain notable apps from the UK when it was an EU member like (funnily enough) Onlyfans - and Cyprus is the preferred legal residence of many adult-content companies. Opera is also from Norway (not in the EU but in the EEA, with the same regulations).

Overall, I think we as Europeans missed the social media boom during the 2000s but we are catching up now in other areas with less established leaders since the late 2010s and early 2020s.

As for new areas, I know the Dutch ASML holds the de-facto monopoly on microchip-making, Denmark and Spain have the biggest renewable energy companies (4 out of the 5 biggest companies), and France has the two most important recycling companies. You should also check all of those things because it might have changed with the pandemic (and there must be other areas that I missed)

>The 2nd wealthiest member [of the EU], UK, has a GDP smaller than Texas.

I love this sentence.

By the way, California has a smaller GDP than Germany and the UK is not a member of the EU (and the Texan GDP is less than two thirds of the UK's, it's similar to Italy's). But either way comparisons in nominal terms are pretty much useless, PPP would show the actual living standards

Not sure if it's a serious question, but linguistic divides, investment culture and the lack of the digital single market are a few of the causes

Talking to you is useless, you can't read. The dude just said taxpayers spend less for more effective welfare that helps them as well, and you're talking about forcing taxpayers to spend more

It's actually a very interesting and complex topic, but usually the reasons are the local markets are still divided by cultural lines (most EU states have their own language and marketing is harder for smaller companies), the EU has more regulations (which means they have to be more careful while growing, which would work in a vacuum but then they're killed by the American and Chinese competitors) and many more

Edit: and obviously this is only for mega-corporations. Europeans get plenty of local versions