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From a non-developed world viewpoint, is it even possible for China/India etc to have there companies grow to such a massive size to rival Facebook, Micrisoft e
by erklik 6y ago
From a non-developed world viewpoint, is it even possible for China/India etc to have there companies grow to such a massive size to rival Facebook, Micrisoft etc without protecting them from multi-nationals with way more immense power and the capacity to simply buy companies?
Ala, Facebook bought Instagram. If there was no such restriction, could they not have just bought Tencent in its infancy?
Essentially ensuring that currently countries that have not developed will continually never develop.
- dragonelite 6y agoJust look at the EU and you have your answer about protecting your young markets.
- f6v 6y agoAnd the answer is that there’s nothing to rival Facebook, Google, etc. in Europe. Save for Yandex in Russia.
- catalogia 6y agoI think we'd all be better off in the long run if the EU did more to hobble American tech companies operating in the EU. Well, all except shareholders of those companies.
- zepto 6y agoFacebook and Google are bad. We need something better. Hobbling them won’t achieve that.
- catalogia 6y agoWhy do you think that? If those companies are hobbled, that will give any EU competitor to them some breathing room.
- zepto 6y agoYeah - I’m aware of this way of thinking. If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that. If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true. If you hobble them through protectionism, you create a vacuum which will be filled by a clone. The clone will then have the same incentives to preserve the status quo as Google and Facebook are doing, just with different ownership. The only way to replace Google and Facebook with something better is to identify and invest in something better - I.e. something that offers value that they can’t. I do believe that government investment, can help with this. I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.
- catalogia 6y ago> If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that. If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true. I think the result would be inherently "actually" superior by virtue of being under the thumb of EU regulation to a degree that American corporations aren't. I'm not talking about technical superiority, which I don't care about. Having locally regulated technically inferior clones is preferable to the status quo. > I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help. And such laws are best enforced against local companies, not foreign companies with foreign values. That's why it's a good idea for the EU to hobble, if not outright ban, American internet companies.
- zepto 6y agoWhat laws do you think would make things better and which ones are not being enforced? What kinds of regulation on social networking and or search would produce a better product?
- marmaduke 6y agoI think an answer based on counter factuals was expected. Such as: if Faang salaries didn’t exert a global brain drain, if non US markets allowed competitors to Faang to exist, etc etc then the landscape would be different. I find your answer rather shallow.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- czottmann 6y agoYou're ignoring the fact of FB, Google et al opening offices all over Germany/EU and paying ludicrous salaries to even junior devs. It is a form of resource theft IMHO. They have the deep coffers to lure young people who otherwise might've started their own businesses. As a result, the IT and developer market is entirely fucked up here in Southern Germany. Yes, yes, "software eating the World" and all that — but the big players (US corps, mostly) are not just by buying up most of the talent but _they create unhealty expectations for the rest of the crowd_. _"I know where to put a semicolon in JS, I expect a starting salary of €100k"_ etc.
- jfengel 6y agoIf they actually truly know where semicolons go in JS, then they may be worth €100k. That's some deep magic, which has bitten this very, very experienced developer in the ass more than once. Getting it right in Java or C is no special feat. Getting it 100% correct in Javascript... that's an accomplishment.
- mixedCase 6y agoa) You're acting as if no one earning a good salary saves up for taking risks later. b) How entitled can you be to tell other people that it's fucked up not to risk it all to make a business where you please, or not to request salaries the industry is willing to pay. All in the name of... what? Nationalism?
- chillacy 6y agoFrom the other point of view of having worked for US software companies all my life, I think the developer market is fucked up in the rest of the world because talented developers are getting criminally underpaid.
- jhomedall 6y agoIs not having an equivalent of Facebook or Google a bad thing?
- betterunix2 6y agoIt is when you are busy investigating those companies for being monopolies...
- darksaints 6y agoDo you have any examples?
- unionpivo 6y agoThere are no examples. Thats the point he is making.
- f6v 6y agoThere’s Zalando in Germany, which sees itself as rival to Amazon, but nowhere as big. And I think it’s safe to say there’s no substantial competition in social networks space. Even though Telegram is registered in London, Durov is playing by the US rules.
- phito 6y agoZalando is only for clothes tho? Here in Belgium we have Coolblue and Bol that are decent alternatives to Amazon
- ClikeX 6y agoCoolblue and Bol in the Netherlands as well. Amazon doesn't really have a big market share here. Bol is also owned by Ahold (Albert Heijn). Which to be fair to them, is a pretty big technical powerhouse for this side of the pond. They've been developing self-checkout systems since the 80's.
- ClikeX 6y agoThe Netherlands used to have Hyves. Which was pretty big at the time. But it just died. After which everyone moved to Facebook.
- y7 6y agoWhy should that be due to protectionism? There could be any number of reasons why the EU has so few large tech companies compared to the US. For example: 1. Costs on top of salary are more expensive in the EU (better worker's rights, more vacation, higher taxes) 2. EU has a more fragmented market than the US in terms of language, demographics, regulations, etc. These don't necessarily apply to China or India.
- bzb4 6y agoAnd let’s not forget that free speech does not exist as a practical right in the EU—a site like Facebook would have to spend inordinate amounts of money on moderation not to get closed.
- dtech 6y agothis is false, numerous EU countries have a similar rights, de juro or de facto. Exceptions and laws against hate speech do tend to be stronger. The fact that you're making such a statement about "the EU" shows how misleading or ignorant you're being, since this is not governed by EU law for the most part. I'd argue that most EU countries have stronger de facto rights, since peaceful protests in the capital don't tend to get beaten into submission like what happened in the Washington last june.
- viklove 6y agoI think you might want to read about this: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yellow-vest-protests-paris-200118175445728.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yello...
- astura 6y agoWhat Europe considers "free speech" isn't the same as what America considers "free speech." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-speech-in-europe-isn-t-what-americans-think https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-s... >On free speech, the U.S. and Europe have also gone different ways. The German minister of justice threatened Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google search back in December, telling them they needed to move faster and better to remove hateful posts that violate German law. Now the minister is proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat. >To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable. Facebook and Twitter are private actors who could censor voluntarily under the Constitution -- indeed, their voluntary censorship would itself be protected speech. >But the government can’t order private censorship any more than it can censor directly. That’s because U.S. constitutional tradition treats hate speech as the advocacy of racist or sexist ideas. They may be repellent, but because they count as ideas, they get full First Amendment protection.
- votepaunchy 6y agoThe US had the opportunity to stop the purchase of Instagram, just as aching could have stopped any purchase of Tencent.
- skinnymuch 6y agoStop the purchase many if not most thought was an overpay by a company that was still possibly a fad? Facebook fully opened to the public in 2009. IG was bought in 2012 as an iPhone only app. No web app, no android app. iPhones were not a big market at the time. Edit: I don’t recall now. The android app may have been in public beta or just released at the time.
- newacct583 6y ago> without protecting them from multi-nationals That's sort of a strawman though. There's a spectrum of "protection". What China does (and the Trump administration proposes, sorta, with its application-level bans) isn't to merely "protect" it's local companies, it's to entirely ban content from global competitors. The problem isn't that Baidu search was "protected" while developing, it's that a Chinese citizen cannot do a search on Google at all. Or follow someone on Twitter. Or join a Facebook group. Anything you might show to the "public" on any of these sites is invisible in China. That is the problem. Not "protection" per se.
- NeutronStar 6y agoYou think having a Facebook makes a country developed?
- Nasrudith 6y agoYes - language and cultural barriers already allow for a divergence. There is no protection needed there as they already exist "naturally".