

Europe v Google: Nothing to stand on - msabalau
http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21648606-google

======
skrebbel
Seriously? The whole story is about search and ads, and thus the Economist
concludes with:

> _But rather than trying to rein in American firms, European politicians
> should focus on fixing what is holding back the old world’s most promising
> platforms: the lack of a common digital market. Today only 15% of consumers
> shop online across borders within the EU._

So to fix a monopolist in search abusing its position, the EU needs to make it
easier for me to buy shoes from Poland with simpler VAT laws. How are those
related at all? There's probably plenty of reasons why no European PhD
dropouts started a successful search company, but cross border e-commerce
isn't one of them.

~~~
blfr
Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies
in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American
giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people.

Google's internal response[1] covers it inadvertently. They show stats for
various European markets with competition in the shopping category, mostly
with other American companies.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951)

~~~
rbehrends
> Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful
> companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with
> American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people.

While it would be nice to get the VAT problems sorted out, this is second to
the problem of there being a couple dozen different languages being used in
the EU. People shop domestically because they can use websites in their native
language and when they have problems, can talk to customer service
representatives in a language they understand.

It is really, really hard to get your service localized in couple dozen
different languages (let alone provide actual customer service in all of
them).

Even Amazon handles only a part of Europe, and if Amazon can't do that, what
companies can? There are a few, but not all that many, and for many it isn't
worth it, because your economies of scale quickly disappear when you have to
build and maintain a separate presence in up to 28 different countries that
mostly speak different languages. (That includes American companies, too, by
the way, many of which simply choose to ignore Estonia or even Sweden and
Portugal.)

~~~
rjtavares
If the problem was the need to maintain a specific presence, then they would
let me use the english language version of the website. But they don't. I'm
tired of "This content isn't available in your country" and "we can't ship x
item to your country" messages...

~~~
musername
localization has to deal with differing laws, too. Differing customs in
general.

------
EdwardDiego
Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of
Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe?
Just because the EU exists, doesn't mean that Europe is suddenly an equivalent
to the 52 states of the US.

Different countries within the EU have different laws, different markets,
different cultures, different ways of doing business, and most obviously,
different languages. Germany is different to France is different to the UK is
different to the Czech Republic is different to Turkey.

This is why there's no single "European search engine" \- and this is why
America is the most attractive (and competed in) market for digital products -
it's huge, well-off, and it's a lot more homogenous (at least in language and
general culture) than Europe.

~~~
skrebbel
> _Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of
> Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe?_

I'm not entirely sure what you're responding to, but the Economist is a
European publication.

~~~
EdwardDiego
Ah, you're right. (I was reading this earlier submission on the same matter:
[http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-
agains...](http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-against-
silicon-valley-will-backfire-3.html) and lumped the two together).

Although I would probably expand that out to ask why people from the UK also
like to reason about (continental) Europe as a singular entity also, when they
should certainly know better.

~~~
ptaipale
There's so often fog in the Channel, and the continent is cut off.

------
tajen
I've worked outside EU in an awesome startup. The VP of engineering went for a
worldwide tour of hype IT capacities, to learn how the like of Twitter,
Facebook, Volkswagen or Barcklays perform top-of-the-class software
development nowadays. He made a blogpost of about 700 lines about worldwide
companies. Europe was at the bottom, in 5 lines: "Europe: Nothing interesting.
These guys haven't even moved to Agile after 13 years". I felt insulted but I
have to reckon he summarized it well.

I'm a sole trader with a "product" strat-up in France. I spend about 10% of my
time on paperwork. I've have a police inspection yesterday "because I'm
flatsharing". We have mandatory taxes and charges of about 70% [1]. There's no
way we can become big.

[1] Income tax: 20%, Mandatory unemployment/state/health benefits 46%, VAT
20%, land tax $300 for using my own flat for professional purpose, corporate
tax, mandatory non-computerized accountant $2800, bank $300, and unclear
legislation compared to, say, UK, requiring hours and hours of reading and tax
dodging.

~~~
ptaipale
You have to pay tax if you run a company at home? Wow.

That's not all of Europe, though, this must be a French peculiarity.

~~~
krzyk
Not only France, same in Poland.

~~~
ptaipale
The taxman cannot in reality come and check your home to see whether you
actually work there or not. Can you rent a brass plate address somewhere which
has a nominal working place, on a cheap rent? A room in a warehouse in an
industrial area could be shared by several (let's say thousands) or people who
actually work at home but claim a company residence there. Yes, criminal, but
not immoral...

~~~
DanBC
I think you under estimate European bureaucracy. While they don't visit every
home they do visit some. As you say tax evasion is criminal; it's a really bad
idea to lie to tax authorities.

Here's the UK government talking about visiting your home to check your
business accounts if you run a business from that home and they want to check
your compliance.

[https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks](https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-
checks)

~~~
ptaipale
Of course you must not lie to tax authorities, but matters are often up to an
interpretation and it is not unreasonable that there's a business address even
if in reality a person does not want to incur every day the expense, emissions
and enmity of traffic in order to travel to that place of business.

In Helsinki, we did have this silly "let's chase the home offices" bureaucracy
in 1970's and 1980's but that hunt went to grave at the same time with the
Soviet Union, deservedly.

------
meowface
>Google (whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sits on the board of The
Economist’s parent company) told staff in an internal memo that it has a “very
strong case” to make against all the allegations.

I'm glad to see disclosures like these.

------
s3r3nity
Is no one going to address the validitiy of their arguments against Google? If
you've followed HN / Reddit the past few days, you would've thought that the
EU is some crazy entity of whack-jobs. But I can't find much in the way of
analysis of why this might seem actually be a worthy debate.

~~~
magicalist
The problem is that the Statement of Objections is private and will apparently
remain that way for some time (this article says "many months"), so no one
really knows what the arguments are (except the European Commission, Google,
and presumably folks like "Fair Search").

------
zaroth
With opinions like these, no wonder they're looking to tax Google for its
success:

    
    
      “Our online businesses are today dependent on a few non-
      EU players,” said Mr Oettinger. “This must not be the
      case again in the future.”
    

So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything
they are doing would be fine?

~~~
Oletros
> So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything
> they are doing would be fine?

No, it would be exactly the same

------
Oletros
> But rather than trying to rein in American firms

Taking into account that the most fined companies regarding anti trust
proceedings are European, I don't know how this claim is not BS

------
higherpurpose
Probably because the EU was "unnaturally" pushed into doing this without fully
understanding what they're doing:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-
once-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-an-
antitrust-target-is-now-googles-regulatory-scold.html)

~~~
WildUtah
Microsoft is just the evil empire that keeps on giving. The Windows monopoly
is weaker than ever, but the scam patents and the PR machine to drive out
competition are still moving politics to keep Microsoft's fading monopolies
powerful enough to slow progress in the industry.

