'I've always found it suspicious that Russia and China created their own social networks, email providers, and search engines. Almost like they know the power of a capable search engine or social network for intelligence gathering purposes.'
Seems like the Europeans are the only ones stupid enough not to.
Europe has been destroyed in WWII only to be liberated by the USA and the USSR (China is also among the winners). The USSR collapsed and withdrew from Eastern Europe, on condition that it remains a buffer zone (think about Ukraine in this context).
The EU is therefore essentially a peace project, subject to the peace treaties ending WWII (this hasn't happened in N. Korea, think about it in this context).
Those treaties are still in force today, including the stationing of liberating forces. This pretty much sets the boundaries, including the defense (read supervision) of strategic resources, such as gas pipelines, energy grids, and yes, communication lines and information technology. Obviously, these restrictions hardly reflect current German economic strength (just like after WWI), which inevitably leads to tensions (‘The Germans Are Bad, Very Bad’, as the POTUS puts it).
Operating systems seems like a weird one to throw in there. For a start I'm pretty sure some Finnish guy wrote and maintains one of the better-known operating system kernels, which happens to be used in certain popular operating systems as Ubuntu (UK) and SuSE (Germany).
Or perhaps you meant mobile operating systems, in which case I would note that the most promising and well-known mobile OS after Android, iOS, and Windows phone (all American) is SailfishOS, which is... Finnish.
So the US is definitely on top, what with all the software tech giants being based there, but Europe seems pretty relevant.
Indefinite Pessimism. China and to a large extent Russia are Definite Pessimists.
The US and the UK are Indefinite Optimists while many in US tech are Definite Optimists (such as Elon Musk.)
Cultural attitudes about the future of our world has a huge influence on the type and velocity of innovation.
Those are generalizations, but just compare investment philosophies of various countries. EU: with a few exceptions that prove the rule, very conservative, less likely to back 100x technology innovations, more likely to back 2x innovations that have low risk and low reward (but enough reward to make a return.)
Russia and China: more likely to invest in keep-up technology (me-too stuff) that promotes domestic stability — much more defensive investing to promote Juche ideas. North Korean “tech” is the extreme example.
US: willing to bet huge on low percentage, future changing tech (speaking of the Valley specifically,) while much of the rest of the US tends to be closer to the EU in terms of risk tolerance, with notable exceptions.
You won’t have an EU investor funding self-driving cars generally and you won’t have a Valley investor funding incremental 2x tech (generally.)
All countries have visionaries and innovators, but due to who controls the finances (and tax policy,) most of those future Elon Musk types are shot down before they even get off the runway.
Exceptions abound of course, but that’s my general take.
The Europeans were developing one of the most interesting secure distributed platforms 10 years ago as part of the European Multilaterally Secure Computing Base initiative, but it appears to have gone dark. Maybe funding priorities shifted, or the technology was deemed to be something that shouldn’t be open.
Seems like the Europeans are the only ones stupid enough not to.