A SK A EUROPEAN politician about Silicon Valley and you get a tirade about les fake news, tax dodging, cultural imperialism, privacy violations and then some. This litany inevitably ends with a gripe that Europe needs to do much more to foster such companies at home.

Europe’s version of techlash often looks like sour grapes. With the possible exception of Spotify, no internet firm successful enough for regulators to worry about was founded there (and the Swedish music-streaming business is listed in New York). SAP , a German software-maker, is big but hails from the pre-internet era. Unicorns, worth $1bn-plus, remain as rare on the old continent as the term suggests they ought to be. Forget Euro-Facebook or Le Google.

Still, much European tech-angst is universally shared. French officials pooh-poohed plans by Facebook to launch its own currency, as have people on Capitol Hill and at the Federal Reserve. Uber is in the cross-hairs of regulators in London, who on September 24th extended its licence for only two months. The gig-economy has also discomfited lawmakers in its home state of California. Antitrust concerns first raised in Europe are now echoed across the Atlantic. Even privacy worries, long a European preserve, are infecting America.

As with many American efforts to regulate Big Tech, EU ones are a work in progress. A copyright law designed to make search engines pay publishers (such as news organisations) for snippets became practically useless after Google last month said it would tweak its search results to avoid such payments; inacceptable, fumed Franck Riester, the French culture minister. A proposal for an EU -wide digital tax has failed. Last month the EU ’s highest court ruled that the quintessentially European “right to be forgotten” (which, for example, forces Google to stop linking to old, embarrassing web content) applied only to searches carried out inside Europe.