Europe stopped building for consumers and gave away its media. Why now is the best time to build.
I live in Amsterdam. My co-founders live in Sweden and Montreal. Our team is spread across Europe, Canada and South Africa, and we're headquartered in the Netherlands. This is where we live, this is where we work, and this is where we build.
Europe was a front runner in the early days of social. Then we became passengers. We tried. Hyves, StudiVZ, Last.fm, Netlog, Xing, Habbo Hotel, Dailymotion. Most of these were outgrown by American platforms in a market with a few winners. And then we stopped trying.
We embraced American and Chinese platforms. Spotify, SoundCloud, and Zenly innovated on consumer product, but they all started more than a decade ago. In the meantime European tech chased SaaS, fintech, crypto, and AI. We gave away our media.
The talent didn't leave. Inspiring companies like Supercell, BeReal, and Amo show it's still there. But they are exceptions.
There is no European YouTube, no European Substack, and no Spotify for video. That's not because Europe lacks talent, it's because no one has tried with the right product at the right moment. But that moment is now.
In December 2025, the Trump administration banned former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton from entering the United States. His offense was enforcing content moderation rules under the Digital Services Act. The EU fined X €120 million under that same act. Musk called for the abolition of the European Union.
In February 2026, the US House Judiciary Committee published a report calling European digital rights organizations, including Bits of Freedom and Justice for Prosperity, "censorious NGOs" for supporting the Digital Services Act. Macron called these actions "coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty."
The US State Department told its diplomats to oppose European data sovereignty laws. A "freedom.gov" platform is being built with a VPN to help Americans bypass European regulations. I'm not editorializing here. This is the current geopolitical reality, and it erodes trust fast.
US cloud providers hold 85% of the European market. The digital infrastructure that European citizens and governments rely on is controlled by companies that are now under political pressure to undermine European regulation.
The EU has built governance frameworks to protect our interests in the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act. US platforms face escalating compliance costs and political friction from Washington for complying with European law.
European platforms that built natively within this framework have a structural advantage that simply didn't exist five years ago.
Trust is eroding fast and governments, companies and consumers are already acting on it. Denmark is replacing American classroom tech with open-source alternatives. France announced plans to drop Zoom and Microsoft Teams from government use by 2027.
A March 2026 YouGov poll of over 5,000 Europeans across five countries found that 62% believe replacing American tech services with European alternatives is a good idea. Only 13% disagreed. But 41% said it was unrealistic. That gap between willingness and perceived feasibility is exactly the opportunity.
This is not a fringe conversation anymore and the world is starting to move because it's personal.
We are not building a European platform for European audiences. We are building the best independent video publishing platform in the world.
Subwave is European Union hosted, GDPR native and embraces privacy by design. Not as a checkbox exercise, but because we build it here for the standards that we live under.
The pressure we see in Europe exists in Canada, Australia, and democracies around the world. Countries that share the same need for sovereign media infrastructure, independent from US platform control. We're building through a European and international lens because this is home, and because the values we build with, transparency, privacy, contributor ownership, democratic governance, are not constraints. They're competitive advantages.
We don't need to fight regulation. We are built for it.
When European consumers and institutions look for platforms they can trust with their media, we intend to be the obvious answer.
But the real shift is not regulatory. It's personal.
As creators and consumers, we are starting to realize our incentives and those of the platforms are no longer aligned. We grow bored of the race to shorter clips and more sensational content. We see the manipulation, the data harvesting, the safety failures.
Every week brings a new example. Australia's online safety regulator recently found that child abuse material is "more accessible on X than on any other mainstream service," and that X's own AI chatbot, Grok, was generating sexualized images of children. Musk had promised in 2022 that "removing child exploitation is priority number one." Four years later, the regulator found the problem was "particularly systemic."
And that awareness is not going away. Users are posting far less, growing weary of ads, AI slop, and rage bait. The leading apps have become less interactive and more entertainment-focused. People are quietly withdrawing, even if they are still online. Gartner predicted that 50% of consumers would significantly limit their social media use by 2025.
Meanwhile, the format is changing. Podcast listenership grew to 584 million people worldwide. YouTube now has over a billion monthly podcast viewers. People are choosing longer, deeper, more personal content over the algorithmic feed. What comes next looks fundamentally different.
And AI is making it possible to build for that shift. Existing platforms need to decide who they want to become, while trying to battle churn and growth rates at massive scale. New platforms can shape their own culture. With new ways to produce stories, new ways to share them, new ways for audiences to experience them. The tools to build something genuinely better exist now, and they didn't three years ago.
There's a new wave building. Consumer awareness, creative ambition, and a new generation of tools, all converging at the same moment. We are not riding a regulatory trend. We are riding a market and product opportunity.
The best products win, time to build.
