> Don't believe me? Watch Eric Schmidt or Marc Andreessen talk about Europe.
Yes, let's follow the guy who was "proud" of Google's tax avoidance scheme [1] or the guy that's happy that oxycontin and video games exist to keep poor people quiet [2].
If these are the parts of the US you want to import to the EU, no thanks.
You know what would change people's minds about taxes? Actually seeing how those taxes are funneled back to improve the lives of the people paying those taxes in a pragmatic and efficient manner.
What tends to happen instead? The cities/countries with highest tax rates (also in Europe) also seem to have an increasingly high violent crime rates. Public transport gets worse every year. The infrastructure rots and collapses everywhere. The public sector is growing increasingly fat and inefficient (pulling the taxes up with it), the queues for social help programs and payouts grows increasingly large every year (more and more people start depending on government payouts). Out-of-control asylum-driven immigration from 3rd world countries. Out-of-control expenditure on war and arms trading. Currency devaluation and high inflation due to bullshit government policies.
So as a tax payer, at some point, you start questioning everything. What are you paying for? Why? Where is this all going? And once you realize how the system truly works - yes, you start thinking about ways to minimize your tax footprint.
I don't really know much about the two people mentioned above, outside of being tech businessmen.
Tax avoidance is different from tax evasion: one refers to not voluntarily donating money to the government, and the other is a crime. The similarity in terms is misleading.
The characterization of the Andreessen quote is 1) inaccurate, as the antecedent in the actual quote is unspecified, and 2) described in the linked article as not being a direct quote.
Eu/acc does not appear to be promoting those two aspects of those two people. All people are multifaceted and flawed. Probably, the website is referencing them because of their apparent success as tech investors/founders.
The argument that paying more taxes than you strictly have to is a "voluntary donations". If you can legally (ab)use loopholes in the tax code to pay less taxes and choose not to, that is an active choice you are making to pay more taxes than necessary. Furthermore you could even argue that as a company it's not even 'your' money, but your shareholder's, and as such you have a duty to them to pay as little tax as legally possible.
Yeah, Schmidt and Andreessen represent the absolute worst of American VC hyper growth culture. They made their money in old models and lack any new ideas other than squeezing the stones of Google etc. Their model will not win the future. They are the ones dragging down the present.
A lot of people go for this crowd and their cartoon amphetamine futurism because the apparent alternative is fear, paralysis, and regression.
If you don’t put forward a positive expansive vision for the future someone else will do it for you, like these guys.
(Edited)
There was a time when leftism and liberalism did this. Leftism put forward a vision of equality that featured workers cooperating to go to the stars. Liberalism and its relatives put forward a world of global trade leading to shared global prosperity and again, to the stars (either literally or metaphorically).
Now it’s all whiny doom and gloom and degrowth, which is a luxury belief for people who are already rich.
One of the biggest things that worries me about our discourse is that only fascists and adjacent types are talking positively about the future. That’s terrifying. Snap out this performative doomer nonsense or fascism is what we get.
> Don't believe me? Watch Eric Schmidt or Marc Andreessen talk about Europe.
This is like saying “Smoking is cool and good for you. Don’t believe me? Watch Big Tobacco talk about health”.
The unfettered addiction to growth and profit championed by the US is turning the world to shit faster. We need that to stop, not chase it irresponsibly and make the problem worse.
Stop treating everything like a competition while misusing the word “innovation” to justify the exploitation of other people.
The argument for growth is ammunition against the kind of cosy deals that are everywhere in Europe, insulating established businesses from competitive pressure. Half the regulations out of the EU are an attempt to level the playing field so that inter-country competition can break up the kind of legalized corruption that forms when wealthy companies are politically connected, but there's a risk of regulatory capture too.
The opposite of growth isn't things staying the same. It's the rest of the world leaving you behind. Not being competitive means being exploited by those currently occupying the nodes of power and money.
This reads like its a group advocating for exactly the wrong kind of deregulation that turns markets into basically unbreakable monopolys.
The EU directly opposes the growth model of the new-era tech startups (ruthless growth financed by investor money, take over competitors, market monopoly) and the regulations aim to keep markets at least a little bit competitive.
We (the EU) do not need or want this kind of deregulation.
There's ways to make life for small-entrepreneurs easier.
I need this kind of deregulation. Example, i m taking microtransactiosn for my game. Giving out VAT invoices for all of them is an impossible task. You need to account for the different VATs in the area (and how they change over time). The cost of the accountant for all this would be many times more than the tiny amounts of the transactions. So i have outsourced the money collection to a US-based merchant-of-record who withholds a large cut and pays out once.
I think a lot of people can point to friction like this in all the places. This has nothing to do with "rughless growth by investor money", but with common sense. There is too much BS work going on in europe, much more than should be allowed
It’s not good example as technicaly you are required to pay the “digital product tax” in many countries outside EU (and more are comming every year).
Actually if you are based in EU paying the EU VAT is the easiest for you because you collect the taxes (just like any ecommerce store would) and use OSS (One Stop Shop) where you pay them to your country along with your native taxes.
You will probably still need MoR because similar schemes GST (australia, canada, india), russia and yes US sales tax. And those would be a lot harder for you to pay than VAT (US sales tax is particularly complicated ad changing).
Now of course you could not care about paying these (unlike EU that would find out quickly) but it could be pretty unfortunate if one gets stopped on trip to Canada about 7 year old unpayed taxes with fines adjusted for inflation…
Dumb question: wouldn't the USA have the same issue with state taxes varying across the country? Or are state taxes collected from where the company is headquartered and not from where customers are purchasing from?
I am European but ur reply perfectly represents why the EU is doomed to fail. The monopolistic super companies will be created no matter what EU does. They are and will be just created somewhere else and EU will be left with nothing just bunch of tier2-3 suppliers to these behemoths.
I refuse to accept that the only way forward is to join the pointless rat race that ends up with the entire society being enslaved to a handful of megacorporations and their shareholders.
I don't want to live in that world, and I don't think most people do either. Yes, if we don't join them, there's a possibility that we might end up being enslaved to foreign megacorporations rather than domestic ones, but at least we'll have a chance to create something less dystopian instead.
That world would be a cyberpunk dystopia with some large conglomerates with power over many nations. I don't think playing that game is the way forward and if the EU can offer a counterpoint to this future I believe it's worth it, much rather live in a place which attempted to curtail this behemoth-creating machine than be an active participant in creating a dystopian future.
This paints a picture of the future that imo is kind of fatalistic and dystopian. I personally refuse to accept that this is the inevitable end state of our society and markets.
Agreed; this criticism comes from the POV of "the US is richer, so let's do what the US does". Instead, we should see that the US is struggling across many, many dimensions and the inordinate success of American Big Tech / Big Business has a lot to do with it. It's like looking at Dubai and saying "oh they are doing great, let's start drilling".
Instead Europe should focus on what's stopping EU companies from scaling and leveraging their strengths: lower costs, better infrastructure, more diverse customers and employees.
As a founder on both sides of the Atlantic, I would keep it simple:
1. The EU needs a common credit rating system, similar to Duns & Bradstreet in the US (which is a private company mind you, so very possible) and more competition between banks that should be allowed to do business anywhere in the EU. The EU banking system is much better than the US one, but the above stop it from scaling across the continent.
2. EU needs to give higher incentives to EU companies to do business with EU startups. The fragmented EU market means that most valuable European companies end up being very conservative in how they spend their money (because competition is weak / settled). Therefore they are much less likely to do business with startups for normal business risk reasons. That's a chilling effect for B2B companies who are more likely to get traction in the US rather than the EU. A simple insurance or tax credit scheme would go a long way to reduce risk --and would help the EU get their money back from many startup / VC programs they are subsidizing anyway.
Regulation protects old, big incumbents that are slow to innovate. How is that a competitive market? Meanwhile innovation, wealth and power is created elsewhere.
Goodness. I'm struggling to respond to this without any snark.
The US has how many states? With how many different rules and regulations between them? I'm sure some things are easier in the US than in the EU. But many things are not. There are some regulations, sure, but I can start a company within 2 business days and do business across the entire EU.
There are some differents in VAT across member states, but those are easily solvable by talking to an accountant. And sure, things get a bit more tricky when you grow to a multinational scale, but then I'm sure you can hire a few more accounts and other pencil pushers.
And hey, we've had free electronic payments across the entire area for nearly two decades. No friction of paper checkbooks here.
The difference between EU member states is _vastly_ more than American states. Like hugely different, to the point trying to compare them is worse then useless.
It's really hard to generalize about this. There are some big differences between some pairs of each, but little to no between other pairs. Many of these probably won't matter to most businesses.
"Europe" is not USA. I don't know why the author wants it to be. Germany and Spain are different countries, even if we have some degree of a unified market.
> From consumer markets, languages, laws, education systems, taxes, to funding – Europe acts like a network of small countries instead of one unified market.
"Europe" does not ACT AS, it IS a network of "small" (not quite) countries.
I think these guys are doing themselves a disservice by donning the mantle of Defenders of California-Style Capitalism®, a thing that nobody likes outside of oligarchs and aspiring oligarchs.
Their first project, smoothing out and equalizing the process of creating a new legal entity, seems like an unqualified good thing. Nobody likes notaries, outside of notaries and aspiring notaries. Having Estonia's level of simplicity in business creation would be a good thing for reckless 'disruptive' startups, but it would be a good thing for small brick-and-mortar artisans and shops too.
If one of their subsequent projects is going to be 'let's make tax laws nicer for billionaires', then yeah, screw those guys. But the first one is already a tall order and I frankly think they're unlikely to get political momentum (see: first paragraph.)
I love the comments to this article. Time and again when such "EU is not friendly to business enough" stuff is posted to HN, Europeans come out and say they like it that way.
Thus I'm skeptical this article will change anything. Europeans have looked to America, and said no. (Or, gave up and moved there.)
EDIT: to be clear I think Europe should be the way Europeans like it.
Can you tell me why we should make EU like the USA if we just can invest into the USA startups and reap the monetary benefits and once they figure out the good and the bad aspects of it, we can adopt it in a regulated manner? It's not like any tech by those "tech" companies didn't made it into Europe.
Sure, experimenting at scale it creates talent in these areas but it also disrupts public life. Let Europeans live like Europeans and Americans live like Americans. Not everyone needs to operate the same way.
I don't think Europe should be just like the USA, sorry if that was unclear. I don't feel strongly either way -- I can see benefits and drawbacks of each style, though I moved to the USA.
I just find it amusing that the linked website (and other calls to make "EU friendly for innovation") assume that the EU is like it is because of ignorance. No, it's because people want it to be this way.
Sure, but compare the American tech indutry to _literally any other country except maybe China_, and you'll see the same thing. And a huge number of Chinese tech companies only exist within China.
European economies always have lived of long term, large scale technology companies. This is the case especially for Germany and France.
Germany especially does not want startups to exist, they want to have companies which are large and succeed over the long term. The employee protection laws in Germany (which are often praised on this site) make it extremely hard to run a startup without violating the law. E.g. if you want to employ someone you need to pay their healthcare and pension insurance. They can't work for more than 10 hours a day, no this doesn't mean you aren't allowed to compell them, you have to actually stop them if they wanted to. How do you build a product while figuring out that bureaucracy?
The European model will succeed if and only if those large corporations are actually able to innovate at the same pace as American or Chinese companies. Which currently looks very unlikely.
If the way you are building a product requires you to risk the well being of your employees, which these laws are designed to protect, you and your product are not welcome here.
This is a trade of. Startups can be extremely lucrative for people willing to take that risk. These laws exist to prevent abuse, yes, but they also prevent highly driven people from engaging in high risk, high reward economic activities.
As I said Germany does not want startups to exist. The only way the German economy can stay competitive if is the large German tech corporations are able to stay competitive.
If you don't want to work hard (10h+ per day) at a startup, then don't. Nobody's forcing you. Working at a startup and finding it's not for you? Just quit! You can just walk out the door. Nobody's forcing you to stay.
Germany is really great in treating its citizens like infants and it shows.
Don't play naive.. the laws and regulations are not put in place for that percent of business owners/managers that would not abuse their employees out of principle even when they can, it's for the other ones that do.
There are actually employees a company is allowed to abuse more than their "regular" workers, namely managers.
If there was a legal category for "startup employee", with significantly fewer protections, but who can only be employed with a minimum wage of e.g. 3x the average income, would you object to that?
What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day? I've never met anyone who could put in more than 8 hours of high quality, attentive knowledge work for more than a few days in a row and if we're being completely honest with ourselves, most of us are lucky if we can consistently put in 6h of that high-quality work.
You might have people occupying seats for 10 hours, but you're definitely burning them out, and they'll make more mistakes, and quality of their work will drop off overall. Don't mistake "butt in seat time" with "innovation pace"
As far as I'm concerned, encouraging employees to work long hours is a dead give-away for bad leaders who want to be perceived as good leaders with a team of people who "get shit done". That's exactly the type of abuse those laws are designed to prevent.
If anyone is really capable, and willing, of doing more work, they'll keep thinking about the problem on their personal time. That's probably where they'll get some of their best ideas anyway and no laws can stop that.
>What are those employees doing for upwards of 10 hours per day?
Hypothetically there could be a very important deadline to meet. I absolutely do not believe that you can consistently do high quality mental work for 8+ hours a day, but certainly I have worked productively for 10+ hours in a single day on occasion, that was during University though.
To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.
I agree it's possible to work 10+ hours on occasion. I quickly looked up German laws regarding working hours, and it seems like the legal weekly maximum is 60h (6x 10h per day) which should cover very occasional crunch time to meet deadlines (that's 50% more than the average work week), but long-term average over 6 months must not exceed 48h/week, which seems sensible.
> To be clear this is in a startup context, an organization which is highly informal and tries to be extremely productive in a short amount of time to create some viable product.
I understand, though I don't believe that working long hours is a productive use of anyone's time over time periods longer than a few weeks. From my personal experience working longer than ~8h impacts both concentration and quality, which decimate efficiency of any subsequent hours worked (more bugs then mean more time needed to fix these bugs, which just adds to the crunch).
After a while these side-effects begin to bleed into the next workday which ultimately nullifies the benefits of longer hours.
I don't know what you are arguing. Do you believe that there will never be a situation where in a startup employers can spend more than 10+ hours of productive work in a day?
I don't know why you are talking as if I didn't completely agree, and already said so, that demand 8+ hours of high quality mental work is counterproductive over long periods of time.
My point remains that German labor laws make startups very hard to do. Not that I believe that you should work 10 hours a day over months, but in a startup there might very well be a situation where you can spend 12 hours effectively, which would be a violation of labor laws.
German here.
There are plenty of ambitious people who work more than 10h/day and nobody cares. Law companies who should know best, are especially known for their dumb working hours. That rule is rather in place to protect workers that are not in a powerful negotiation position. Which is fine I guess.
About healthcare: wouldn't that make it actually easier to hire employees because they know they'll be covered if they join a startup (risky!) instead of having to worry about that as well?
>There are plenty of ambitious people who work more than 10h/day and nobody cares.
If you are an employer and allow this you are really, really dumb.
>About healthcare: wouldn't that make it actually easier to hire employees because they know they'll be covered if they join a startup (risky!) instead of having to worry about that as well?
No. It isn't about money, it is the fact that if you want to hire someone, you have to spend hours upon hours each month managing their legal rights. The process of legally keeping an employee in Germany is incredibly involved, healthcare is just one point, but there are many more.
In America you can just offer people enough money and tell them to worry about health insurance themselves. If you are running a startup and trying your hardest to make some product a reality the last thing you want to worry about is the details of your employees health insurance.
If you were paid 3 times your current salary, but you had to worry about your own healthcare, pension insurance and were expected to put in serious effort, would you take that offer? And, even if not, would such an offer be so immoral that companies aren't allowed to make it?
The bureaucracy is a pain... the taxes are a pain... but otherwise, it's more of a cultural issue than a legal one.
Finding people who'll work for free in the begining is hard... unless you're personal friends, no way. Working more than 8 hours a day is a no-go for most people, especially professionals in whatever field you need. 5+ weeks of vacation is a must (both legally and in a sense, that everyone will want and expect that). On the other hand, wages are lower than in US.
There are things that can be optimized.. i'm a coowner/employer in a small eu country, and we require workers to pass a health check to start work + additional ones every 5 years or less (5 years for office work and other "normal" jobs, and less for eg. truck drivers, pilots, etc). But somehow, those health checks are not transferrable between employers, even if it's the same kind of work (eg. office job -> office job), so if the employee of one company went through a check two months ago, changes a job to another office job, the new employer has to pay for a new health check which will check the same things as the previous one two months ago, so it's a few hundred of euros of cost and sometimes even a few weeks of wait time.
Need a really short-term worker (eg. organizing a concert/festival, need someone to work for two days only?)... no way, you can only get student workesrs, because the hiring process is too long, noone will change a job for two days of work, and you can't get the unemployed to do it, because they'd have to restart their unemployment process again (a lot of work), to get benefits back.
But you don't have to go further to see similar criticism of US bureaucracy for example.
I absolutely advise against people trying to do this on their own without consulting with specialists first. In the same way people shouldn't do this in the US (like opening an IT company in some random state).
But I'd say the attitude and market problem in Europe is harder (even in some more "market-oriented" countries)
Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government (or regional governments) in the first place? This is what I see as eu/acc's focus: You shouldn't be doing proverbial song and dances as a small to mid size company to appease cushy government employees with Annexure B.5 page 12 section 3 subsection 25 form D every time you want to change the wifi password.
Running lifestyle or smal to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world. And yes, you can be a startup without wanting to be a unicorn.
It is possible to want to make money AND not have your soul drained in the process.
Note that my advice was more towards people who want to do an investment, is planning a startup, a company that might grow up, etc
> Why is there a need to have specialists just to interface with one's local government
True, in theory you shouldn't need it. And more than current officials, there's a lot of legislation that is to blame, but this is besides the point.
You consult with specialists because they know how to pick the best option for you and how to do it without wasting time. I'm all for DIY but sometimes you'll just bang your head trying to do it alone.
> Running lifestyle or small to mid scale businesses, especially with knowledge work, is increasingly hindered by inflexible government admin in the first world
For those kind of companies it's "easier-ish" to DIY. But you'd have to stay small. And I agree, it would be better if it was easier. And the difficulty is definitely not exclusive to Europe https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startup+taxation
They're ignoring start up successes within Europe. I suspect most complaining about this use Spotify - started in Sweden. Revolut is also very popular for people after a crypto-friendly bank. Monzo is credited with revolutionising bank accounts within the UK.
Afaik, until recently it was difficult to send money between two bank accounts in the US for free - hence the proliferation of "tech solutions" like Cash App and Venmo. That just isn't a thing in the UK, banks have supported free instant bank transfers for years. So, maybe just maybe - we have fewer startups because our systems aren't as crippled as the ones in the US?
Also ignoring that some of the economic activity created by these companies can be a net negative benefit to society, cases like: startups trying to solve the mess that healthcare is in the USA, it will generate income, have customers, etc. but it is just providing a service that shouldn't exist at first, similar to how natural disasters will increase a country's GDP because of all the construction required to deal with the aftermath, economic activity generated by patching issues in society is not necessarily a positive. Same with everyone requiring a car to go places, amazing for car sales (and increases in GDP from the production chain) but it's not the most beneficial way for a society to transport itself, incurs recurring costs on car maintenance, insurance, increased road/infrastructure maintenance, injuries/fatalities from road accidents, etc.
The USA has a lot of startups trying to solve issues that probably shouldn't exist in the first place (filling income tax reports for example, what the fuck?) but those bullshit products generate wealth to some people.
It’s not just in startups. Even in finance space we just paid lawyers to deal with all that stuff like notaries and act as a buffer. I can see startups not having that kind of money though - we spent million on lawyers.
Tech side there is a wider issue though imo: Much of the EU thinking is unfortunately directly orthogonal to what’s required.
eg Google is basically one giant ad tech tracking co. That obviously clashes with EU thinking on privacy.
Not saying either is right or wrong but does seem like at least part of the clash is quite fundamental rather than being a pure red tape issue. Facebook Insta TikTok - they’re all fundamentally in same ad space
A lot of comments here seem to only be focusing on the startup -> unicorn/corporate/big tech pipeline of eu/acc instead of also the solo/lifestyle/small/medium business side as well.
EU already has things like the OSS VAT scheme in the regard of making things easier for businesses across the union. More things like it to simplify admin for the rest of us is a good thing.
> It is very much the bureaucracy that’s holding it back
If by "bureaucracy" you mean "not being allowed to blatantly break the law(s)", then yes, it is very much so.
> The corruption then makes it worse.
Blaming issues in Europe/EU (two different things by the way) on corruption seems to indicate you don't really have a perspective on corruption as an issue in the world. Take a look at South America or various Asian countries to see corruption as something actually having a huge impact.
> Why do so few countries in EU have ride sharing?
What countries are you referring to here exactly? I don't I've visited a single country in Europe that didn't have some sort of "ride sharing" (app taxis?)
Letting people share their cars for riding incur increased risks, at least insurance should be different from a family's car who has the usual riders and the odd trip with other people vs a car which is being share with hundreds to thousands of different riders each month. How do you, as a government, ask for a different insurance class in this case? Regulation.
Same with Airbnb, having some guests over from time to time it's just usual life, hosting people to make money is a business and the business of hosting people has different rules than having a guest at home.
We can debate if such rules should be relaxed, if they make sense or need to be updated, etc., but these rules were created out of necessity through time, just allowing some tech company to completely sideline it because "it's tech!" is absurd...
What's the difference between a taxi driver and a "normal person" in this story? They're both making money from driving a person from A to B. Sounds to me like they should both follow the same rules.
In germany the difference would be the license to transport other people.
At least that was named as the issue when Uber initially wanted to expend to Germany.
> Ride sharing is letting normal people earn money by sharing their car
What startups/companies/apps that people use in the US (which I guess is where you're from?) allow people to do this without treating it as a job or a side-job?
> In e.g. Spain IIRC Uber is just a front end for the taxis.
It is not, and if you take a moment to read up on the history of Uber in Spain, you'd clearly see that that's not the case. There has literally been violent protests about just this thing.
EDIT: I checked, and for Denmark it’s just the bikes. It’s probably the same for most of the listed European countries.
Original comment: I _think_ that it’s not “real” ride sharing in many of the noted places. E.g. it shows Denmark, and in all my years living there I’ve never seen one. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal. I imagine they are just a front end for standard taxis.
Almost all EU countries have some ridesharing apps available in the cities. There are many apps though, and always only a couple of them compete in a particular country.
AFAIK it's the same with food delivery apps now. (Sometimes both the rides and the food delivery is done by the same company - e.g. Bolt.)
Haven't traveled to Denmark recently, but always use Bolt and/or Uber when traveling in Europe - can't recall a place where it wasn't available (Portugal, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Spain, Italy all had them from the top of my head).
Sure, but they each wield billions of dollars, and there are plenty saner industrialists with a similiarly grim (and undeserved imo) opinion of Europe.
How easy/hard is it for someone in Europe to set up a company in Delaware and then pay themselves dividends to transfer the earnings into their personal income?
Would that shield them from all the European bureaucracy?
Or would their government say something like "Sorry, since you are here personally, we consider the company to be here as well"?
It’s challenging to incorporate in a country where you are not personally tax resident. Permanent establishment and controlled foreign corporation rules make it complicated to manage it correctly
Overall it could be a good idea to have a solid and attractive european solution. It would have an effect on the national solutions but Europe took already their first credit so it’s not far away to start taxation.
>For startups, Europe’s main problem is fragmentation.
EU exist exactly with the purpose of removing "fragmentation" and integration of Europe into a single giant market but European countries are not ready to let go their sovereignty and do a lot of things their way. As the UK found out with Brexit, EU removes red tape and simplifies bureaucracy, thus makes trade frictionless as possible and not the other way around.
Anyway, I don't think this is the root cause of EU lagging in "tech". EU doesn't lag in technology, it lags in high growth speculative businesses and I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing.
Europeans can invest in these things in countries where people are willing to do it, reap the financial benefits if there's any and once the enshittification begins it can protect its own population from it. For example, once the enshittification begins and the companies resort in rent seeking EU regulates those to protect the consumers.
The reason Europeans don't do this "tech" business is cultural IMHO. No regulation or removing of regulation can change it.
> EU exist exactly with the purpose of removing "fragmentation" and integration of Europe into a single giant marke
In many ways it seems the fragmented economy was more liquid than the EU area is now. Instead of having pockets of acceleration in small corners of the EU, we now have uniformly heavy friction throughout. That's why businesses can find more dynamic business partners in china or turkey than they can in EU. Eastern european countries are often doing a lot to remove friction, but even they are often punished or asked to change their ways in order to keep with the rest of the block. It's turning to a crabs in a bucket situation
Right, the classic issue of not being a single country.
AFAIK EU is pushing to fix this through Eurozone and tax harmonisation but some European countries don't feel like it. Probably they have an advantageous position or an industry they would like to protect.
Like the whole idea behind EU is basically fixing this. It started as a single market and through the years Europe is trying to bring the continent together and how stuff should be done(all the EU standardizations are essentially about ironing out the legal differences between ~30 countries so that it function like one single country). Not there yet, unfortunately.
In all honesty, it’s so bad that, by now, Europe is considered a meme in the international organ trafficking ecosystem. A place potential traffickers "have to leave".
Don't believe me? Watch the Iranian minister of health talk about Europe. It's so common as an opinion that even many future organ traffickers in Europe start to believe it too.
To change this we need to create an environment where organ trafficking can succeed. If we want the innovation created in our bodies to be brought to the blood market by Europeans instead of Iranians we need to fix the root causes.
...
Or, you know, maybe the regulatory environment is deliberately the way it is because Europeans think that certain business models are not acceptable, would harm them or would otherwise be costly and don't want you engaging in them?
Have you considered that maybe European countries have different markets, rules, regulations, social security, taxation, procurement, etc. and don't want to change or erase their way of life just so you can earn more money?
If you wish to convince Europeans to change all that, assuming that everybody dislikes the status quo is a really bad starting point.
For us Europeans, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. There are bugs that we should fix, but this particular thing isn't one of them.
I work for an ex-EU (UK) startup, and I'm grateful for all the regulation. Yes, it means we innovate less, but we get to kill fewer people, which I really like.
Meanwhile, Teslas just run full-speed into barriers, and Tesla just goes "well, maybe you shouldn't have used our autopilot then, huh?".
I don't think notaries reading documents aloud in person, instead of e-signatures, is what prevents people from being killed. Neither is having 27 different e-signature systems instead of a unified one.
I could have said the same after your comment. Unless the linked manifesto had a hidden paragraph where they recommended killing safety regulations and consumer rights, as opposed to harmonising the creation of legal entities.
>>I work for an ex-EU (UK) startup, and I'm grateful for all the regulation. Yes, it means we innovate less, but we get to kill fewer people, which I really like.
No machine developed in Europe ever killed a person?
Yes it is, and that's why I didn't make it. I already said that there are problems that should be solved, but the fact that companies aren't free to do anything they want, unchecked, isn't one of them.
That's a false dichotomy. Labor laws can be made more lax in regards to certain areas (which might very well create problems) without removing any and all requirements on businesses, which certainly does not apply to the US, which als has some, state dependent, labor laws.
Of course they don't need. In 2000s there were popular local social networks that were much better moderated and lost not because of quality, but because of unavailable investment (disk space to store users' photos and videos was expensive then) and lack of any moral restraints of US-based and China-based megacorps. So now we have this toxic crap and have to pretend content moderation is some intractable problem.
Sounds a bit like you are saying that it would be perhaps better to have European-made social networks instead of leaving up the entire market for foreign companies.
The megascale entrenchment is needing a specialist consultant to navigate tax and compliance laws just for your company to exist, let alone operate, and especially operate in multiple EU jurisdictions.
EU OSS VAT is a great example of a program that simplifies these sorts of operations. eu/acc is clearly asking for more like that.
You conveniently missed the fact they got entrenched before interfacing with any EU jurisdiction. Can't get any simpler than that.
And what's up with the loaded statement about "tax and compliance laws just for your company to exist"...that's not true, any attempts to censor internet in EU are marginal so they could exist fine without that. But now that they want to extract profit of EU users and businesses, they have to navigate like everyone else.
>For startups, Europe’s main problem is fragmentation.
No, the problem are administrative burdens dictated from a far away place (Brussels).
>Europe acts like a network of small countries instead of one unified market.
Yes, exactly. One still has to fill out customs declaration for packets inside the EU for example. The EU is just another burden on top national administrations, we can go back to EEA and would not feel any differences (but safe a lot of money)
And last but not least, the EU is not democratic:
>>Since 1979, the Parliament has been directly elected every five years by the citizens of the European Union through universal suffrage.
BUT
>>However, it does not formally possess the right of initiative (i.e. the right to formally initiate the legislative procedure) in the way that most national parliaments of the member states do, as the right of initiative is a prerogative of the European Commission. Nonetheless, the Parliament and the Council each have the right to request the Commission to initiate the legislative procedure and put forward a proposal.
> One still has to fill out customs declaration for packets inside the EU for example.
This is false. Inside the customs union there is zero paperwork involved to send goods. Put it in a box, slap an address label on it, bring it to your favorite parcel carrier, done.
Yes, let's follow the guy who was "proud" of Google's tax avoidance scheme [1] or the guy that's happy that oxycontin and video games exist to keep poor people quiet [2].
If these are the parts of the US you want to import to the EU, no thanks.
[1]: https://www.itpro.com/644638/eric-schmidt-proud-of-google-ta...
[2]: https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andrees...