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Do you honestly think that without US companies, there will be no search engines and social networks? Here in the Netherlands we had Hyves[1] before we had Face
by Thiez 9y ago
Do you honestly think that without US companies, there will be no search engines and social networks? Here in the Netherlands we had Hyves[1] before we had Facebook, which was pretty big. If, for whatever reason, Facebook were to vanish tomorrow from the EU tomorrow, I have little doubt that we'd all be on a different social network by Christmas. Of course there would be a lot of complaining during the first two weeks. I would miss Google more than I would Facebook, but perhaps an influx of 500 million new users would give competing search engines the income to improve their results to equal those of Google (perhaps they're already of comparable quality and I just haven't noticed).
Google and Facebook are making a lot of money in the EU, and leaving the EU because they have to pay more taxes would be like cutting off the nose to spite the face. It just wouldn't make financial sense, and shareholders would (understandably) be furious.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyves
- whb07 9y agoI didn't say they would truly close their doors to EU business. Very much the same way they operate in most of the world, that they should apply that to the EU. Google/Facebook don't have offices in over 100+ countries and yet they clearly serve those consumers from those countries just fine. Take for example my country of Ecuador. I'd find it hard to believe that any tech company is paying taxes in Ecuador and yet their citizens reap vast uses and benefits from Google/Facebook. I'm guessing this applies to 99% of other countries as well. I'm of a libertarian skew, so most taxes are essentially theft to keep the fat bureaucracy happy. In the case of the EU it's clear extortion.