How about actually supporting the European Tech industry instead of just adding endless bureaucracy?
Ban Oracle and Microsoft from public procurement and start supporting the European equivalent of Baidu or Yandex. With ARM (prior to the acquisition), Linux, MariaDB, etc. - Europe was in a great position to do this.
We need to stop this digital colonialism where massive, monopolistic US corporations pay no taxes in Europe, and then take all the profits back to the US where they pay 3x the salaries - only supporting the US economy.
>How about actually supporting the European Tech industry instead of just adding endless bureaucracy?
Why do you make it sound like they don't? The EU invests massive amounts in technology (in regards to its paltry investment budget, but that's another debate).
One does not prevent the other. And calling regulations against clear abuse "endless bureaucracy" is insidious at best.
I believe the EU would be better off if it just deleted its technology funding apparatus and tried to rebuild something like DARPA, while focusing on procurement like the poster suggested.
There is a huge amount of money available, but it's locked behind layers and layers of bureaucracy. It is a huge waste of time on both sides, for some anecdotal I'm procrastinating from an application as I type. I should be coding or doing something otherwise useful.
The situation has devolved to where startups treat public funding as though it were revenue and have dedicated teams to chase it.
The Economist had an article here a few days ago lamenting that Europe fails to produce IPOs, which is where the actual problem lies. If ExpectedValue[European Startup] = ExpectedValue[Startup] | No IPO, then it's no wonder European startups are valued at 10% of their US counterparts.
The EU needs to get out of the way and end its Lots of Little Winners policy, because without winners you just wind up with Lots of Little Losers in a globalised economy.
I don't see how its in anyone's interest to generate more rent-seeking giants. All these R&D statistics are bullshit as they work on tax data, which in turn clearly incentivises companies to classify every programmer or engineering salary as research. A healthy world needs more dynamic startups, not more anticompetitive giants that squeeze or buy everyone else. The US or Chinese advantage is not quality engineering or better companies, its just financial engineering and huge state or venture financing specifically intended yo generate winners.
I'm happy that the EU still bets on the small guys.
Of course you don't, but someone offering to make you a multi-millionaire is hard to say no to. I imagine. I've never been in the situation unfortunately.
Generally it's not you making the decision but some investor who needs to close out a 10y fund and can force the sale through some nasty term in the SHA.
In a unicorn situation, the founder will generally take money off the table early and will be okay regardless. Just look at WeWork.
It certainly is, but in the US there have apparently been enough incentives for some founders not to accept an offer at that level. Some of those founders have gone on to build their businesses up to billion-dollar valuations, with dominance in their field, and now they've become the ones doing the investing and acquiring for the next generation of tech businesses. We have almost none of that in Europe, and I think it's important to ask why. I don't believe we lack people with ideas, skills and entrepreneurial instincts, and that means something else is getting in the way.
The issue is that there are a bunch of big is companies with way too much cash who can buy any potential competitor. I do not feel it matters much how they got that big. What we instead need to limit is their ability to buy competitors.
I think both are important. There is a question of what we do to prevent any successful medium-sized European business becoming a small part of some huge US business. But there is also a question of how our entire entrepreneurial sector got so broken on this side of the Atlantic that such a huge imbalance arose in the first place. If we don't address the issues that caused that to happen once, surely it will tend to happen again sooner or later.
If we stopped them buying competitors they'd just build their own competitor, and then the founders with the original idea would probably lose and nothing else would change. At least while FAANGs buy up their competitors the founders get an exit.
It is, as always, an inequality issue.
Sadly, the alternative is not acceptable in a neoliberal world: no european company is willing or able to pay up for a promising technology as much as Google, Apple or Amazon will, but nation-states definitely can.
Interesting, where do retirement savings go? I don't know much about the European context beyond the S = I identity from my intro macro courses back in the day.
Personal savings usually go into real estate and conservative savings instruments (savings account with minuscule interests payments, life insurance). Public pensions are just part of the regular money flow of the State. Taxes come in from the employed, budget goes out to the retired.
There are companies and people specialized to get grants and funding from the eu. They will take 15-20% . Most of the time the money goes to incompetent companies, but with good connections. Normally you’d call this corruption, but of course that doesn’t happen here.
In general, to its users, hopefully without also being detrimental to society as a whole. But my point here is mainly "shouldn't the goal of a company be to produce a useful product or service rather than simply to make money for its shareholders?"
An interesting question is: what's the ROI of this investment. Anecdotally, the over the last 50 years the EU has been loosing their leadership in field after field. First to the US, then Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, now China. With the loss of the UK Arm is no longer an EU company. Have you looked into Linux commits recently [1], or where papers come from in the top CS conferences?
And calling regulations against clear abuse "endless democracy" is insidious at best.
Well, GP wrote "endless bureaucracy" not "endless democracy", unless the comment has been edited.
And that, IMNSHO as someone who has founded tech businesses here, is entirely fair criticism. The environment created by all those regulations is insanely hostile to tech entrepreneurship, and it's not as if many of those regulations are well considered or effective at protecting vulnerable groups anyway.
The worst part is, I'm not convinced anyone deep inside the EU corridors of power even realises this is what they are doing. If the first step in solving a problem is understanding that it exists, the EU is still at step 0.
> And that, IMNSHO as someone who has founded tech businesses here, is entirely fair criticism. The environment created by all those regulations is insanely hostile to tech entrepreneurship, and it's not as if many of those regulations are well considered or effective at protecting vulnerable groups anyway.
yup.
Many different rules in eu countries, fscked up tax rules for companies trading with foreing customers, high taxes for relatively well paid tech workers, and high cost of entry into the business is killing european businesses.
Even starting a business is hard... I hear a lot of people from USA who (eg.) find a old t-shirt printing press in a yard sale, and start their own t-shirt printing business, fill out some forms, sell 7 tshirts in two years, mostly to family, and then stop doing it. Just being able to letally sell a t-shirt in many eu states will cost you thousands and thousands of euros, where it's just not worth it to start. Wanna make an app by yourself and host the backend on a $5 digitalocean VM? Sure... but do it for free. Want to earn something? If you have just a few dollars of income, it's not worth it... you need a lot of users paying you a lot of money to pay the government fees, even if you work for free.
You have companies that specialise in creating "start ups" that get tax payer funding, ride the money wave out and then close. Usually they put homeless people in suits to act as CEOs. One business folds, they create another one. Then governments complain the public purse is shrinking and there is no economic growth.
Please add some details or citation to this. It’s a fascinating idea and I’d like to know more. I mean YC is literally in the business of startup businesses but your whole remark about the homeless guys has thrown me perhaps it needs \/s?
IMHO, the taxpayer funding aspect is a red herring anyway.
There is no reason that a small team of founders or even a solo founder should not be able to start and grow a tech/software business well. The natural barriers to entry are very low in this industry. If you have a useful idea, the technical skills to implement it, and the willingness to try, you should never need lots of external help to build a viable business.
Obviously there are advantages to taking substantial external investment or other funding, and doing so usually also comes with strings attached. You have to weigh up whether the cost/benefit is favourable. But in a tech/software business, this should primarily be useful for accelerating the success of a business already destined to be successful. We're not talking about manufacturing where you need to pay for factory facilities and supply chains of physical materials and other big up-front costs before you can start creating value yourself that you can charge for.
The reason it is increasingly difficult for any small founding team to actually do that in much of Europe has a lot more to do with regulatory barriers and red tape than lack of funding. No startup is going to perform well if someone keeps distracting the people building it and making them do things that aren't directly adding value.
I see this comment a lot but I have never seen any evidence for this. What exactly is the barrier that a tech startup faces in Europe vs US? Which regulations are in the way (and are they EU or national ones)?
There is a lot of bs thrown around e.g. GDPR is far from evil or bothersome, as well funded lobby groups have made it out to be. You don't need cookie warnings if you use cookies to log your users in, only if you sell your users out to google and other analytics companies. You are obliged to have unsubscribe links in your emails to users. You have to provide and delete data you hold on specific users if requested. From a few hundred thousand users you need a data controller which is for ally responsible to watch out for data breaches (this is just an identified person, not a full time post). What's the big deal?
Much more stifling are e.g. the processes to register a company in the country you are based in or to get a bank account, and of course Europe's language diversity shrinks the potential reach so most that want to scale do so in English and then find it convenient to have offices e.g. in the US or UK.
I see this comment a lot but I have never seen any evidence for this.
While this is not intended as a criticism of you personally, you have ironically just demonstrated a big part of the problem. I might reply that I have seen this response a lot, no matter how often I have previously given detailed examples, sometimes even in the same forum. A lot of people who haven't themselves tried to run a business in this environment are almost completely unaware of the hassle it can be. Here in the UK, this is a particularly poignant issue because of the poor quality of "debate" around Brexit a few years ago.
Now, to answer your question, here are a few of the different barriers a new tech business would face here in the UK right now.
1. It's been difficult-to-impossible to open a new business bank account for the past several months. The big banks have (they claim) been so busy administering government support schemes for existing business customers that they couldn't take on any more. Government have been mostly ineffective at dealing with this problem.
2. To hire anyone (other than owner-directors, when some of this might not apply) means drawing up employment contracts with all the required elements, establishing formal grievance and disciplinary processes, being aware of numerous employment regulations, arranging all required insurance policies, identifying what evidence you need to keep to confirm a candidate's legal right to work for you, understanding any relevant minimum wages and time off including many kinds of statutory leave and pay, understanding your health and safety obligations including things you must say/provide/fund for your employee, establishing a payroll system and integrating that with the government's real-time information system if you haven't already done this, setting up a compliant company pension scheme if you haven't already done this, and who knows what else because this sentence is already half a screen long.
3. All of your personal data processing needs to be GDPR compliant. Its defenders like to say this isn't a big burden because it "just" means you have to do a few reasonable-looking things they can type out in a single comment. However, the main GDPR document alone is nearly 100 pages long and that's before you consider all the supporting material and the views of 28 different regulators. One of these things is not the same scale as the other.
4. If you're selling B2C, the consumer rights rules will apply. Again, on the face of it, that's fine. Who can object to fair protections for consumers, right? But when you actually read them, they are full of things that aren't well considered, like defaults that probably no-one would ever want, long and highly context-sensitive lists of information that must be provided at different times, obscenely disproportionate penalties for minor infractions by merchants, etc.
5. VAT. I'm not going to elaborate much, though I could write a pretty long book on the subject at this point. You're welcome to Google the numerous extensive criticisms out there. I suggest starting with #vatmess. Pay particular attention to how the EU changed the rules so what used to be a single market where merchants treated customers anywhere in Europe the same as in their home country got turned into a situation where merchants had to understand and comply with the tax rates and rules in every one of 28 member states. This is literally the opposite of the EU promise of creating a single market.
6. The IP landscape is unclear. Attempts to standardise it have repeatedly failed. No-one really knows what you can or can't get a patent for, or even what types of inventions you can or can't get a patent for. Copyright rules differ significantly with geographical location, and in some places additional related rights exist.
7. Lots of relatively minor stuff like the "cookie law", which is a tiny and yet totemic issue. It was well-intentioned but written by people who didn't really understand the technology and its implications. It doesn't do much to protect anyone. It annoys almost everyone. Non-compliance is widespread, whether deliberately or through simple misunderstanding or ignorance of what is technically required. There is little enforcement in practice, so operators who do make the effort to comply are left at a disadvantage. And years later, all of this still hasn't been properly fixed even though just about everyone agrees on it.
Edit to add:
8. How could I forget PSD2/SCA? There's nothing like putting obstacles in the way of actually collecting money from your customers to help a business grow.
Many of the rules around hiring employees are national rather than EU, so anything that did the whole lot as a turnkey solution would probably have to vary significantly from one member state to another (and within the UK, which for now remains aligned with the EU rules as well).
You can certainly get software that handles things like payroll and statutory leave. Using it has become a practical necessity anyway since governments like the UK's started requiring payroll data to be filed electronically using approved software built on top of their API.
IMHO, the problem with becoming an employer for the first time is that there are so many things that an employer is now required to arrange that even if they are individually quite reasonable the cumulative effort can be a deterrent.
For example, if an employee at your tech firm uses a display screen, you must arrange and pay for an eyesight test with a suitably qualified professional if they ask for one. You must also pay for their glasses if they need an extra prescription specifically for display screen use, but you don't need to do this if their ordinary prescription is already suitable.
While you're dealing with H&S issues, don't forget to conduct your suitable and sufficient risk assessment for each new employee who is going to be working from home during the pandemic restrictions and then make any changes needed so they can do so in a safe and healthy way, whatever any of that actually means in practice.
The list of things you're automatically responsible for the moment you become someone's employer is pretty long in my country, and if you want to get it even close to right you'll probably end up dealing with lawyers, accountants, insurers, pension providers, HMRC, anyone who makes related software you now need to use, and from time to time possibly others like medical professionals.
As far as I'm aware, the closest thing to a turnkey solution that covers all of this is engaging an HR professional, presumably on a consultancy basis since you hardly need one full time if you're a bootstrapped startup looking for employee #1. But then that's more cost to deal with, and it's still going to take considerable time for one or more of your founders to make all the necessary arrangements even if you've brought in an expert to tell you what those arrangements need to be.
In NL, you can’t fire someone. Only in certain cases, after a long buildup of cases about this person.
So you do temporary contracts, but after 3 periods, it will be indefinite.
People are “sick”, and you get to keep paying them for a couple of years.
Now combine this with self funded companies, and 1 bad hire can kill your company
It really doesn't. The EU invests massive amounts of money into bureaucracy and companies that go through it. But we don't need companies sucking of the EU teat, we need tech companies.
> calling regulations against clear abuse "endless bureaucracy" is insidious at best
It's insidious, yes, but also what if foreign competitors gain a competitive advantage due to fewer regulations?
They will still need to follow EU regulations, but they gain R&D momentum locally.
The only solution I see is to bar foreign companies that do not adopt EU regulations locally too - e.g. a self-driving car developer that does not need to follow safety regulation as strictly locally.
Calling it bureaucracy, whatever the implications, is perfectly fair... assuming we're talking about the subject of this article.
This is about 27 separate national governments to apply separate regulatory procedures, rather than just having Ireland's current gdpr enforcement. That's not necessarily bad, but it is more bureaucracy.
A major goal of GDPR was to streamline enforcement and reduce compliance cost. Then people thought they could use Ireland to just avoid it, and instead they now have to worry about 27 DPAs, so it utterly backfired. Same dynamic in USA: they blocked national level privacy laws for decades and now they’ll have to deal with 50 state laws instead, which is much more onerous.
US states will not have the same issues that GDPR had. The bounds of enforcement will be much more clear and the US has a much clearer way of dealing with vagueness in laws in general. Despite assurances, US companies do not like the “the statute documents the intent but not all of the specifics” approach the EU uses.
> The EU invests massive amounts in technology (in regards to its paltry investment budget, but that's another debate)
The problem is that the EU invests. Small businesses are taxed to death and swamped with bureaucracy. From that you can clearly see where this is going.
As someone running s small business in the EU: how am I taxed to death? The only taxes a startup really needs to care about are taxes on salary but since competent employees are a fraction of the cost here compared to SF it does not matter that taxes are higher. There is also VAT which can affect some businesses but in general is not too big of a deal.
No, I can't see how taxes are to blame. Taxes are not signficant concern for most startups.
I've never worked at a place where vacation was random. The most common pattern I've seen is a fairly tight bell curve centered on July, with individuals spread out a bit depending on individual and business needs.
IMO the issue isn't so much the taxation, although this has a big impact on hiring since you need to be very certain about anyone you keep past their trial period.
The bigger issue is that the US has a massive advantage, in that a US tech company can launch in one language (their native language) to 300+ million potential customers, and hire from the same pool with minimal bureaucracy (the laws are largely the same, and at least written in the same language, ID and visa requirements are the same, payment providers are mostly the same, etc.)
In Europe on the other hand, to launch even to other countries in the EU involves a lot of translation work. Then taxation varies a lot, and the laws are in different languages so you'll need local lawyers and a local tax office to hire employees there, etc. - on the employee side, the ID and visa requirements vary a lot too, so you'll need local specialists / relocation companies to help with that. The payment providers also differ a lot, e.g. with Sofort-überweisung in Germany and the lack of online card payment options there (until recently), etc.
And then there's the extra EU regulations - the GDPR, cookie consent laws, age verification laws for video content, link tax for aggregation services, etc.
But I still think the best solution in the short-term is protectionism. Give European companies a bigger advantage in Europe by not sourcing from foreign corporations (especially for critical infrastructure like public services), and invest in FOSS and development companies around that (where smaller companies could work together on FOSS projects).
Otherwise the US companies just dominate, and then use their dominant position to get a monopoly through bribes and threats (see Microsoft in Hungary and Munich for example). Then they pay no taxes in the EU, take all the profit back to the US and use that to crush EU industry even further - just like how in the past natural resources were plundered from colonies, but all the skilled industry was kept in the coloniser countries.
Reality is different. The EU just loves to talk to Amazon. The politicians are in awe of anyone from big tech. Star struck. It’s disturbing to have seen this from up close
How about we actually think hard about the situation, formulate clearly why we don't like it and propose non-ad-hoc legislation that fixes the specific issues? Banning companies on the basis of "too powerful"/"I don't like them" is how dictatorships work, we should strive to be better than that, even if it is more work. I agree with your motives, but I still believe in the "legal state" ideal.
> That's the UK govt standard for document/data exchange. Short, simple and open. Get the basics right first then tackle the complicated stuff.
Which would be great if they actually followed their guidance.
In reality, the UK Westminster government is one of the worst entities for pushing out spreadsheets that use over-engineered excel-specific validation (often wrong for excel, too) with protection. There is no offer of an ods version, only xlsx.
> How about actually supporting the European Tech industry instead of just adding endless bureaucracy?
Their power is to make rules, so they will make rules because it is all they know how to do. Leaving things alone is often the most difficult (and important) thing to do.
If all you have is a ban hammer, everything looks like a flame?
I'm not sure that criticism is entirely valid, as it looks at European institutions exclusively. Surely lobby groups and their perpetual pressure on legislators play a role, too, like they would for the US House and Senate. Even with that pressure, I suppose they could "leave well alone", but then they'd be seen as uncooperative and ignoring their constituents.
I'd like to live in a world where legislators have competent cabinets and can be assumed to be reasonably well-informed, but for instance the Facebook hearings have shown there's a long way to go.
Even non-technical issues show this to be true. Case in point: the UK and Dutch governments thinking they would solve the housing crisis by giving mortgage grants to starters. Expectation: case closed. Reality: housing prices surged even more due to the cash injection.
who cares about new rules when nobody is enforcing them. it has been 3 years since gdpr is in effect, but nobody actually cares, especially the U.S. tech giants.
Calling them tech associates them with inventors and people who want to improve life.
The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma is a more accurate association. They purport to help and in some situation they do. We all love cat videos and notes from mom and dad. But they make money from addicting people. Whatever technologies they create serve that mission. They're not opposed to improving the quality of users' lives, but that's a side effect. Mostly they relieve craving in ways that recreate it.
Europe is not America and emulating American mercantilism is probably not going to result in anything positive, as the European market is too decentralized for the kind of collusion between the political/diplomatic system that allows the American multinationals to dominate.
What the EU should do is play to it's strengths as the last organizations left that takes the regulative role required by smiths model of capitalism serious and start enforcing transparency, choice and interoperability on the digital field, with the same zeal it treats similar regulation in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.
For one thing, these countries employ thousands of people in the EU. Banning them from public procurement would hurt many of their residents, and still wouldn't guarantee good solutions.
As a practical matter, there would need to be exemptions (and usually are). There is closed source software used by government that has no open source equivalent, is unlikely to have an open source equivalent in the foreseeable future for various reasons, and the government has no leverage to force the companies to make their software open source.
Some things can be open source, the government already uses a lot of open source in many countries, but the government has little recourse if providers of critical software capabilities refuse to do business under those terms.
I'd be curious about an example of a country where this is at all a requirement. Sadly I think not even Estonia asks for that, they just work with great central services and APIs.
It‘s starting to happen in Germany, at least in healthcare. The Corona Warn App was open sourced (developed by SAP und Deutsche Telekom) and the server software (developed by IBM) will also be open sourced (https://www.kma-online.de/aktuelles/it-digital-health/detail...)
> Ban Oracle and Microsoft from public procurement and start supporting the European equivalent of Baidu or Yandex.
Neither of those are EU either, are they? Baidu is Chinese and Yandex is Russia (admittedly they are in Europe, but not part of the EU). How is that any different, from the EU's perspective, to supporting Oracle and Microsoft? Unless I'm misinformed, which is entirely possible.
The commenter said equivalent. They were not saying the EU should fund Baidu or Yandex. They were saying to either find or create an equivalent in the EU and fund that.
Curious as to how one expects to will such a company into existence, but whatever I guess.
I don't want to replace Facebook's panopticon data collection with a European one in the name of European nationalism, I just want companies to respect user privacy, I don't want to adopt Russian or Chinese style surveillance state-capitalism to do.. what exactly?
America, Russia and China are heading head first into cyberpunk dystopia and your suggestion is we better hurry up because we're currently being stopped by 'endless bureaucracy'? I'm gonna be honest I'd rather take the bureaucracy than play that game
>How about actually supporting the European Tech industry instead of just adding endless bureaucracy?
How about doing both the first while also ensuring that european law is actually being followed? So far US monopolists have relied on being in bed with Irish lawmakers to avoid the GDPR fines.
If the state can only regulate the economy, which is part of its core task and cannot be done by any other entity, or pump money into it, I'd absolutely prefer the former.
Because not everything is about money and business. The EU while far from perfect does try and look out for, respect, and care for its people. Both at an EU wide level, and at individual country levels. GDPR and this are both attempts to provide more protection to individuals. Not necessarily to build homegrown alternatives. The problem isn't the specific company, but how companies in this sector act.
It won't happen. EU bureaucracy just likes to travel from one capital to another and enjoying 5 star comfort pretending to be extremely busy completely disconnected from reality.
Its not that they haven't poured in huge amounts of cash into science and tech. Its that its all gone into building ivory towers even more disconnected from reality. So the people in those ivory towers have no clue how to compete in a ruthless world.
When someone just gets cash grants without loosing sweet and blood how the fuck are they supposed to compete with people around the world who have that experience?
> When someone just gets cash grants without loosing sweet and blood how the fuck are they supposed to compete with people around the world who have that experience?
Somehow, "market forces" (in a certain not-literal sense) where supposed to take care of this. In an honest marketplace there exists a level of competition which keeps the participants honest.
Back when knowledge still needed a physical merchandise-like form to be transferred (even as printed books) this market-given-honesty pattern still somewhat worked. But the modern digital age has completely broken this.
There's just something fundamentally different about "cognitive commodities" (i.e. digital data) and "merchandise" (i.e. goods with physical exclusiveness) which completely changes things
Neither Airbus nor Boeing has initiated a new aircraft design since the late 90s early 2000s with the A380 and 787 respectively.
The A220, a legitimate clean-sheet and fantastic aircraft, came from Bombardier and only fell into Airbus hands due to regulatory warfare, albeit from the American side this time.
What is it with the British Isles and their "job specialization" in arbitraging / milking the economy of continental Europe?
From the financial rent seeking of London, to the tax and privacy regulatory arbitrages of Ireland the same pattern of exploiting arbitrarily erected information walls to evade scrutiny and accountability.
Of course this is a tango that takes three to dance...
London is an exercise in marketing, to see how far peoples suspension of disbelief can be stretched whilst being a net drain on a country it isn't even strictly part of, and a drain the world as a whole.
It is amazing to see how Brits outside of (hell, even in) London live, the British countryside has some of the poorest areas in western Europe. Evidence marketing is effective!
Anecdotally, the stereotypical British farmer is a wealthy Tory, and low income populations are concentrated in council estates in postindustrial northern towns and cities (i.e. not the countryside).
to most non-brits, Britain is effectively divided between "London" and "anything else". This "anything else" can be referenced to, more or less interchangeably, as "the countryside", "Scotland" or (after Game of Thrones) "the North". Manchester is basically a London suburb, Sheffield is just a factory that closed in the '80s, and Birmingham doesn't exist.
From my US PoV, most smallholder farmers in the UK are not rich or wealthy, but almost subsistence --perhaps better than break even but do not generate enough income so one partner has to keep a professional job.
As for post industrial rust-towns, I think of the northeast/Newcastle, Humberside & Scotland --maybe influenced by 'The Post War Dream' and Kris Killip's photography.
Maybe it's a matter of perspective: If you buy a million pound property to live in and keep as a hobby farm that also generates a little bit of income, are you "subsistence" or in fact "very wealthy"?
Ireland is an outlier in the fact that her ascendancy coincided with the US tech boom and language was an advantage. You have a very awkward situation developing and the current political leaders don't have the imagination to get out of it.
The UK is an outlier because though they had a far more robust and diverse economy they threw everything into finance and have just burned any bridges back.
The UK is an outlier because though they had a far more robust and diverse economy they threw everything into finance and have just burned any bridges back.
It's not a British Isle -- it's an Irish one. Great Britain refers to the main island composing England, Scotland and Wales. The Irish isle of Ireland is composed of the two Irelands (Ireland and Northern Ireland). The 'British Isles' term is disputed by many Irish people. The reason it's not a geographic term is because it's not a river -- Britain is a geopolitical entity not a purely geographic one.
The fact the Ireland was head of the GDPR for the EU was merely an odd coincidence and has been rectified. You won't many upset Irish people over this.
> The British Isles are a group of islands in the North Atlantic off the north-western coast of continental Europe, consisting of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides and over six thousand smaller islands. [They] include two sovereign states, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
People in Northern Ireland like me consider themselves British and we are a third of the population, while obviously not the majority I wouldn't call it uncommon.
I also believe anyone in Northern Ireland who consider themselves to be British are British. However, does that imply usage of the term "British Isles"?
Simply Britain and Ireland (or Ireland and Britain) is far more commonly used if referring to the archipelago.
The talk pages and edit history for the Wikipedia article on the British Isles term are interesting. You can see the arguments and edit wars. Much like the insistence on naming the country page for Ireland the "Republic of Ireland' (which is our football team and country descriptor, not the name of the country), I think Wikipedia are on the wrong side of history here, but some editors até vociferous in their objections to change.
They keep doing these things that are ostensibly aimed at hurting Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. But the effect of their actions just entrenches those big players, who have the money and the legal teams and the resources, such that the added regulatory burden widens their moats and suppresses upstart competition.
Perhaps it slows down bigger tech companies ability to innovate.
My tech co has spent a significant amount of energy complying with GDPR and CCPA the last couple years while the products have received less and less feature improvements.
A brand new entrant would likely bolt on compliance to their innovative product once it reached critical mass, not before.
The real result is preventing smaller players from emerging.
Big tech can easily deal with regulations, they have money. A new social network? It doesn't stand a chance, especially if they raised money in Europe.
I wonder if Big Tech will bail out the EU once they collapse on their debts.
Its very hard. Even if you build an EU Facebook that is awesome, how do you make users switch? All the data is in the old Facebook. Not just your profile: groups, pages, marketplace etc etc
Enforcing the GDPR properly would make Facebook as we currently know it unsustainable, so they'd have to charge money, opening themselves up to competition.
Thats quite harsh though, lots of people rely on Facebook for their business/pages/groups etc. Whats more the U.S can retaliate back since it can be seen as protectionism...
I don’t deny that lots of people rely on Facebook.
However what the GDPR demands seems absolutely reasonable. All it requires is that the company must be transparent with what data it collects, how it uses it and gives each individual control of whether they want to allow Facebook to collect and use their data for specific purposes.
If Facebook can’t sustain itself without stalking everyone, it’s a problem with Facebook, not with the GDPR.
Well since it's gonna destroy Europe not just for Facebook but probably all big U.S tech I don't see why the U.S won't reciprocate with nice tariffs on EU auto industry for instance. It seems quite draconian actually since almost no one complies with GDPR to that extent.
One of the resolutions that I frequently make competitive high school debaters debate about is a proposal for the EU to federalize and form the united states of Europe. Honestly, the EU really should try this. African leaders are also trying to form a United States of Africa, and I wouldn't be surprised if something like it happens by the 2030s or 2040s...
I'm guessing you're not European from this comment. This is not meant as an attack; it just seems like your comment lacks the perspective of actually living in the EU.
EU law makes news. It doesn't make many obvious appearances in day to day life when you're living there, however.
From my perspective, EU law does not play the most dominant role in everyday life. Apart from the big (or super silly) changes, it’s often more of a news maker. Take that plus big cultural differences (most notably: not being able to understand each other’s language), and you get a feeling of own nationalities.
There are still so many cultural and legislative differences between countries that people don't feel Europeans, they identify with the individual country.
The UK was definitely the country which stood out the most in EU, so after Brexit, the EU lost one furthest away country in its block, in terms of diversity.
EU law cover stuff you hardly run into. Sure, you have euros everywhere but they don't regulate how much taxes you pay or how your national health care is managed.
All is fine until they start regulating on things that matter. Immigration is definitely one of the first sector where people started noticing they're in the EU, because they're unhappy with the results.
US bureaucracy is not any better than EU. Have you dealt with the FDA, FAA or SEC?
The difference is that the EU tries to protect people in different aspects like social rights or privacy. The US does not offer similar protection, so in some sectors you don't hit the bureaucracy.
The US started as a fresh new country with minimal state and unbridled capitalism and became the largest state in the world.
There are still a few remnants of the old days (like all that capital $$$) but it basically become an Europe with expensive healthcare, expensive universities and tons of social issues.
might be a joke, but the thought of being the Wise Old Men setting rules for the rest of the world plays perfectly well to our historical strengths, so to speak. Euro man burden, anyone?
But does ASML build anything? or is their business just owning the "IP" (though, granted knowing this things is not trivial, and it's even more difficult given their closedness)
Provided the GDPR now actually gets enforced, this would clean up the web from all the obnoxious consent flows (remember those are not compliant with the GDPR to begin with).
This will also make Facebook and similar monopolies less toxic as they'd have to either obey the law at a loss or start charging for their services, opening themselves up to competition.
This is the european equivalent to project golden shield. Establish hostile laws, locking google,amazon and fb out & grow local companies to fill the gap.
Nothing about these laws is specific to foreign companies. It's specific to data abusing companies and if those come from within Europe they get fined too.
Ban Oracle and Microsoft from public procurement and start supporting the European equivalent of Baidu or Yandex. With ARM (prior to the acquisition), Linux, MariaDB, etc. - Europe was in a great position to do this.
We need to stop this digital colonialism where massive, monopolistic US corporations pay no taxes in Europe, and then take all the profits back to the US where they pay 3x the salaries - only supporting the US economy.