Wait, who actually likes paying taxes?
//edit: Forgot I'm on Lemmy. I'll show myself out, comrades.
You are right, I am speculating, as was the poster of the parent comment. I certainly didn't mean to muddy any waters, but you have to admit that there have been things going on within the EU, that paint a bit of a bleak picture of how the table might turn if the EU had greater influence/power (in terms of aforementioned platforms and software) on the global stage.
And while you're right that the examples I gave didn't become actual law just yet, it's certainly not due to the EUs benevolence that proposals didn't materialize, but instead very much like in Mozilla's case, that the outcry from people had them reconsider.
However, I believe there were proposals that were put into law even though the outcry was there. (eg. Article 13?)
European companies and governments regrettably aren't better, they simply don't have that many eyes on them because, well, they don't have much to show for to begin with. Name a production-ready made-in-Europe browser/browser-engine. Name a widespread European messenger. A European smartphone platform? European Facebook or Twitter? Anything?
Even the few small scale European examples that you might come up with had an absurd amount of controversy to them. Remember that Tutanota thing? Remember Chat Control?
The reason people believe that Europe is so much more privacy respecting than the US is simply because there aren't many services to exercise the same level of invasive, authoritarian control over than in the US. If 60% of the world however would be using a Nokia minäPuhelin you would see the same, if not worse, privacy-invasive regulation and controversy popping off every other week.
NLNet
The main problem with these Funds, especially European ones, are the inability of the people running the funds to properly identify technologies and direct funding to the right projects. If you have ever taken a look at NLNet's projects you will find how there's a 20:1 ratio of projects that are like "Errrr... okay" versus "Yes, that's a useful thing to fund". It also doesn't help the case that a noticeable amount of the funded projects appear relatively low in activity already.
For example, NLNet is funding bringing an extremely niche and largely irrelevant Android ROM to an even more niche phone and helping it release an update (?!?), while on the other hand you cannot find any support for a smartphone-related project that makes actual sense. I'd argue that there are plenty more successful "de-googled" Android ROMs that have a better track record and a larger user base than Replicant. And I'd also argue that there are a lot more reasonable Pinephone projects (cough cough Camera cough) to sponsor than bringing Android to it to make it.... another Android phone?
Horizon Europe
Horizon on the other hand has a different focus. It is not an open-source fund, but a broad "technology research" fund that ventures into health, environmental and many more areas. Horizon is very much politically driven. One famous example is the Horizon 2021-2022 programme agenda, which they unfortunately deleted, that describes HORIZON-CL3-2021-FCT-01-02: Lawful interception using new and emerging technologies (5G & beyond, quantum computing and encryption). Horizon is the very initiative that ProtonMail received funding from, btw.
Long story short, I don't think more funds and programs are needed, but rather a different way of how the existing ones are being run. From what I see, in many cases funds either completely miss the target, or they suffer from NIH syndrome when there are existing alternatives.
In addition, Denmark has the highest top personal income tax rate in Europe in 2025, at 55.9%.
So I guess this is actually great news for everyone here that loves paying taxes, as now they get to do it even longer! Bummer all the people making a decent living off of these taxes (politicians) won't participate. Who could have seen that coming?