Makes sense, as Americans tend to live in a bubble :)
Some of them from the top of my head, that you might or might not recognize: Asos, JustEat, Skyscanner, SoundCloud, LastFM, DailyMotion, Raspberry PI (foundation more than company though), Shazam, Mojang, Skype, King, Spotify, Klarna, Trivago, Xing and BlaBlaCar. I'm pretty sure some of these are quite popular in even the US.
(maybe some of them are not having their HQ in EU anymore, but they certainly had at one point)
You probably shouldn't insult Americans and then make statements you already know to be erroneous.
As you are apparently well aware, Skype is owned by Microsoft. It's an American product now (from the perspective of who pays any fines). Mojang sold to Microsoft. It and Minecraft are owned by the Americans now.
Asos is an online fashion and beauty retailer. Having a website doesn't make you a tech firm. Ditto for JustEat.
Raspberry Pi - as you note - isn't even a firm at all, let alone a tech firm.
Shazam is in the process of being bought by Apple, although the EU appear to be trying to block it.
You tried to name tech firms that are based inside the EU and mostly ended up listing firms that either aren't tech firms by any conventional definition, or are now owned by US companies. I think that proves the original point.
The companies started out being non-american, then they ended up being bought up by US companies. I don't think that says "there is no EU based tech firms" but rather "There are EU based tech firms! But some of them get bought up by US companies and some stay, but at one point they were all EU based". So doesn't at all prove the original point.
In context it is equivalent. This thread is about why the EU wouldn't write a law that only affects US based tech firms, if that was the intention. Someone answered that there's no need because there are no EU based tech firms worth anything (no significant employment or tax revenue).
That point was correct. The responses all ended up naming either firms that are tiny, or which aren't any longer based in the EU (so there's no need to protect them from the effects of bad laws that primarily affect tech firms). Where they started is irrelevant to the discussion because what matters is who pays fines today.
That's because they use English company/product names for the most part. You probably have heard of some of them unknowingly: AVG, Jetbrains, F-Secure, Suse, Last.fm, Dailymotion, Yubico, Raspberry Pi and many more.
