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EU has done a lot to stifle the tech sector in the EU. This is a step in the right direction however. It's not possible to create a tech sector when all your d

EU has done a lot to stifle the tech sector in the EU. This is a step in the right direction however. It's not possible to create a tech sector when all your data passes through USA, NSA and other 3 letter entities. China did it, Russia partly did it. The US is doing it now. I hope the EU acts swiftly to build a moat to stop haemorraging human and capital resources to the US. There is plenty of talent to support a thriving euro- and world-class tech ecosystem, but it needs to be strategically protected, the same way the US has done to date

mtgx 6y ago
Probably by far the biggest and most positive thing the EU could do to ensure EU startups come anywhere close to US startups in growth is to mandate English as the second official language for all EU members. The language barrier is a HUGE problem for EU businesses. It's the main reason why online services grow 100x slower in the "European Union" compared to the same service being offered in the US, where a "state's language" makes no difference, because it's the same everywhere. Because there isn't such "high scalability potential" as it is in the US, due to the language barrier, you also don't see as many investors throwing millions of euro at "ideas with potential".
- kharak 6y ago
  Not sure why you've got downvoated into oblivion. Factually right, practically not possible (EU doesn't have that power). Also hugely unpopular, maybe that's why the dv happened.
- Vespasian 6y ago
  a) That would kill the EU in an instance. Most people don't identify with the Bloc, they do with their countries and language is such an important fact of that. b) The EU has exactly as much power as their member states (which are sovereign, see Brexit) give her. And the members have decided to not give her that particular ability. Despite what you might read on the Internet the EU is NOT the United States of Europe. It (or a successor) may be one day, but that day is at least a century away.
- return1 6y ago
  This exact idea is something i m advocating for decades. Some countries already have english as a sec language (cyprus and i think malta).
  - aatharuv 6y ago
    The countries which have English as a second language.... were both British colonies until the 1960's. Malta had once even pondered integrating into the United Kingdom, though later gained independence and became a Republic. Cyprus has some undergraduate education in English (a friend of mine from Kuwait had gone to college there). Other European countries don't have that history.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Similar story for Ireland.
    - return1 6y ago
      That just means that 3 or more are already on the plan. With the UK gone it s not even an issue of rivalry anymore. The eu could promote this as a means to facilitate international trade, and frankly i dont see why members would disagree since it s already de facto happening
- Aerroon 6y ago
  This would help businesses, but it would take a long time to pay off. Furthermore, just because a language is taught in schools doesn't mean people become competent at it. Schools don't give students the experience required to become confident in the use of the language. If you don't achieve that then people will prefer their native language solution instead. That aside, there's a much bigger problem: sovereignty. How many Europeans would just accept a foreign language being made mandatory in their country? Eastern Europe still remembers Russification. We also have the example of French and its spread in France. I'm afraid that this kind of a rule would threaten the entire European Union project.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    > Schools don't give students the experience required to become confident in the use of the language Some countries are way, way better than others at teaching English. You can check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index. Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway are at the top with very high proficiency. France is 31st and is famously terrible at teaching English. Spain is 35th, Italy 36th. So it seems to be possible to have good English from school when done correctly. > How many Europeans would just accept a foreign language being made mandatory in their country? Yep, almost nobody would accept this, that's for sure. People in France are already angry toward Ursula von der Leyen because she didn't speak enough French during the recent State of the Union... I personally don't care that much about my own native language and would love to see English be used instead, but that's clearly not the way others see it.
- vimy 6y ago
  Seems unlikely. Translations aren’t that expensive. Different laws and regulations between EU members is a bigger problem. Take GDPR for example. One law, 27 agencies interpreting it in a different way.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dgellow 6y ago
    The language fragmentation has quite a lot of associated costs. Translations are in fact quite expensive if you want to keep the quality of the messaging. But beyond that, the lack of common language means it is quite difficult to develop a common culture between Europeans countries. Between France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxemburg we have a somewhat shared culture because French is common to us, even if we have important local differences. For example as a swiss I consumed French and Belgian media my entire childhood, so I'm familiar with cultural references. When you move to Germany for example, you are now in a completely different bubble with very little shared context. That's my personal experience at least.
    - vimy 6y ago
      Belgium is a good example of how languages aren't such a big deal. Most websites here are either Dutch & French or only one language if you only want to sell to your own language community. There is not much shared culture between Flemings and Walloons. I have no idea what kind of music, tv shows, movies are popular in Wallonia nor could I tell you the name of 5 famous Walloons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yet we can do business with each other just fine.
- realityking 6y ago
  While no doubt helpful it’s also completely unrealistic as a number of commenters have pointed out. There are however many things the EU could work on that would help: - common market for financial financial services (why does a FinTech company have to register in every country it wants to do business in?) - common market for media rights (why do I have different rules to license a song or movie in different countries? We don’t need 27 iTunes Stores) - common market for telecommunication (ISPs and mobile operators still function independently even if they share a brand) - common labor market - make it easier to hire across borders (my employer is having a tough time hiring regional employees as we have to get set up in every country with a legal entity and register for taxes, social security) It’s also important to acknowledge how far Europe has gotten. The common Customs area, the Euro, SEPA, Schengen all help make doing business in Europe across countries a lot easier. The also help make talent more mobile as it’s easier to move across borders.
- Someone 6y ago
  I think you would have to mandate English as the first language to get on level terms with the USA. Most educated Europeans already speak English as a second (or third, fourth, …) language, but many still prefer to be spoken to in their first language (historically often because they don’t speak English that well, but that already has been slowly changing for decades)
ben_w 6y ago
The EU or the nations which are members of the EU? (Current EU VAT rules definitely suck for small multi-nation startups, but the rule as I understand it is “pay VAT where you customers are” which brings me back to the nations themselves rather than the supernational trading block).
- Aerroon 6y ago
  The VAT rule is on the EU though. It was implemented without much thought about collateral damage. They even forgot to have a minimum threshold for it, which resulted in some online micro businesses shutting down. It took years for them to implement a minimum threshold. As the rules were initially, it encouraged very small digital businesses not to sell to other EU countries. Think about that. You are in the UK. You create knitting patterns that you sell online. Somebody from Latvia wants to purchase your knitting pattern. However, you don't have any other customers from Latvia. You're better off not selling to that customer to avoid the paperwork for VAT to Latvia. This is a digital product that can be copied at nearly no cost. Politicians saw the light at some point and implemented a minimum threshold for VAT for these kinds of payments. I still cannot understand why this took years. From 2015: https://euobserver.com/opinion/129961 https://euobserver.com/opinion/129961 Sorry, but I'm still salty about it.
harryf 6y ago
> EU has done a lot to stifle the tech sector in the EU. Examples? The only thing you might argue is privacy laws and there we could be thankful to the EU for being the only trading block that's made some (perhaps futile) effort to protect their civilians rights.
latch 6y ago
I don't understand what you're saying. First, why can't you "create a tech sector when all your data passes through USA..."? What does one have to do with the other? Are you talking about espionage? If so, is there any evidence that the EU tech sector has been stifled because of US government espionage? Also, this article is about data collection and disinformation. What does that have to do with "build[ing] a moat to stop haemorraging human and capital resources to the US" ?? And, anyways, what exactly has the US done, at a policy / regulatory level to "strategically protect" this?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  The US has done (and avoided doing) everything to keep their tech giants getting bigger, from keeping centralized internet infrastructure on US soil to lax privacy laws, to blocking competing payments tech like blockchains, to immigrations law, to providing a good environment for those companies to grow grow grow. It's a strategic choice to dominate IT that has borne fruit, and only China got away. I don't think that was pure accident, just look at the contrast in welfare between the US big tech sector and the US telecom sector.
- amoshi 6y ago
  >If so, is there any evidence that the EU tech sector has been stifled because of US government espionage? Other sectors have been, and there's no reason tech would be immune to this. Also, it's only logical that attempts to create an EU tech sector, therefore threatening the US dominance, would be met with attempts to stiffle it similar to the ones below. >In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech. >In the early 1990s, the US National Security Agency intercepted the communications between the European aerospace company Airbus and the Saudi Arabian national airline. In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA, acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[65] As a result, the American aerospace company McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) won the multibillion-dollar contract instead of Airbus. >The American defense contractor Raytheon won a US$1.3 billion contract with the Government of Brazil to monitor the Amazon rainforest after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), acting as a whistleblower, reported that Raytheon's French competitor Thomson-Alcatel had been paying bribes to get the contract. >In order to boost America's position in trade negotiations with the then Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in 1995 the CIA eavesdropped on the conversations between Japanese bureaucrats and executives of car manufacturers Toyota and Nissan. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON You can argue that the bribing cases make the US government the "good guy", but I can safely say that the NSA/CIA would not leverage it's espionage capabilites to subvert a US companies deals/operations. And remember, these are only the cases that we know about.
Joeri 6y ago
The EU cannot create a tech sector like the other blocks because of the cultural barriers. There is no common language and no common media. That means you have to launch country by country, adapting product and marketing strategy for every country. Meanwhile, in the US it is easy to launch a simple product and market it to the entire country. That means US companies are orders of magnitude easier to scale up to behemoths. In fact, if an EU tech company wants to grow really big, it is better off trying to conquer the US (like spotify). There is no fix for this. Even if the EU managed to take away the many regulatory differences between member nations and created a funding source equal to silicon valley, and managed to keep the US tech giants at bay, the EU tech industry will never rival that of the US. IMHO this is a good thing. Megacorporations are an economic antipattern. It is better to have a million small businesses serving their local market than a few giants covering the continent.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  That's a common trope but i think it's false. Different languages did not matter for many other industries, autos, foods, tourism, etc. IT is not about making content, it's about hosting it and there are plenty of good hosts in EU. It's not as if europeans learn about europe when they are on US social media anyway. Most of what they hear is about US and Trump, not their local stuff. That hasn't prevented Twitter and FB or ebay or whatever to become huge in europe. Besides far too many europeans do their work in English, hell even Brussels operates in english apart from some public appearances. I ve certainly never used another language in any EU project i joined.
grishka 6y ago
> Russia partly did it Russian government had no part in this. It's just the fact that US companies didn't consider Russia a worthy market back then. So, naturally, we've had our own companies like VKontakte and Yandex copy what the US counterparts had to offer, and when Facebook and Google noticed Russia and tried expanding into it, it was too late.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > when Facebook and Google noticed Russia and tried expanding into it, it was too late. There were competing social networks in europe and UK as well, big names. Why are those in the graveyard though?
  - grishka 6y ago
    They probably didn't gain enough traction and network effect before Facebook started its efforts to expand. Just to put that into perspective: by 2010, VKontakte had around 60M users and exceeded 100M by the end of the year. Meanwhile Facebook wasn't even fully translated into Russian, and it was this obscure thing some hipsters used as their secondary social network.
  - machiaweliczny 6y ago
    In Poland people switched to Facebook due to network effect and because it's super hard to compete with preinstalled application. Local competitor had 10M users (same as Google usage, 40M country) and lost due to preinstalled FB apps on mobile. We still have local competition to Amazon but I guess days are numbered as they just filled for IPO.

mtgx 6y ago

Probably by far the biggest and most positive thing the EU could do to ensure EU startups come anywhere close to US startups in growth is to mandate English as the second official language for all EU members. The language barrier is a HUGE problem for EU businesses. It's the main reason why online services grow 100x slower in the "European Union" compared to the same service being offered in the US, where a "state's language" makes no difference, because it's the same everywhere. Because there isn't such "high scalability potential" as it is in the US, due to the language barrier, you also don't see as many investors throwing millions of euro at "ideas with potential".

kharak 6y ago
Not sure why you've got downvoated into oblivion. Factually right, practically not possible (EU doesn't have that power). Also hugely unpopular, maybe that's why the dv happened.
Vespasian 6y ago
a) That would kill the EU in an instance. Most people don't identify with the Bloc, they do with their countries and language is such an important fact of that. b) The EU has exactly as much power as their member states (which are sovereign, see Brexit) give her. And the members have decided to not give her that particular ability. Despite what you might read on the Internet the EU is NOT the United States of Europe. It (or a successor) may be one day, but that day is at least a century away.
return1 6y ago
This exact idea is something i m advocating for decades. Some countries already have english as a sec language (cyprus and i think malta).
- aatharuv 6y ago
  The countries which have English as a second language.... were both British colonies until the 1960's. Malta had once even pondered integrating into the United Kingdom, though later gained independence and became a Republic. Cyprus has some undergraduate education in English (a friend of mine from Kuwait had gone to college there). Other European countries don't have that history.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Similar story for Ireland.
  - return1 6y ago
    That just means that 3 or more are already on the plan. With the UK gone it s not even an issue of rivalry anymore. The eu could promote this as a means to facilitate international trade, and frankly i dont see why members would disagree since it s already de facto happening
Aerroon 6y ago
This would help businesses, but it would take a long time to pay off. Furthermore, just because a language is taught in schools doesn't mean people become competent at it. Schools don't give students the experience required to become confident in the use of the language. If you don't achieve that then people will prefer their native language solution instead. That aside, there's a much bigger problem: sovereignty. How many Europeans would just accept a foreign language being made mandatory in their country? Eastern Europe still remembers Russification. We also have the example of French and its spread in France. I'm afraid that this kind of a rule would threaten the entire European Union project.
- dgellow 6y ago
  > Schools don't give students the experience required to become confident in the use of the language Some countries are way, way better than others at teaching English. You can check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index. Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway are at the top with very high proficiency. France is 31st and is famously terrible at teaching English. Spain is 35th, Italy 36th. So it seems to be possible to have good English from school when done correctly. > How many Europeans would just accept a foreign language being made mandatory in their country? Yep, almost nobody would accept this, that's for sure. People in France are already angry toward Ursula von der Leyen because she didn't speak enough French during the recent State of the Union... I personally don't care that much about my own native language and would love to see English be used instead, but that's clearly not the way others see it.
vimy 6y ago
Seems unlikely. Translations aren’t that expensive. Different laws and regulations between EU members is a bigger problem. Take GDPR for example. One law, 27 agencies interpreting it in a different way.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dgellow 6y ago
  The language fragmentation has quite a lot of associated costs. Translations are in fact quite expensive if you want to keep the quality of the messaging. But beyond that, the lack of common language means it is quite difficult to develop a common culture between Europeans countries. Between France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxemburg we have a somewhat shared culture because French is common to us, even if we have important local differences. For example as a swiss I consumed French and Belgian media my entire childhood, so I'm familiar with cultural references. When you move to Germany for example, you are now in a completely different bubble with very little shared context. That's my personal experience at least.
  - vimy 6y ago
    Belgium is a good example of how languages aren't such a big deal. Most websites here are either Dutch & French or only one language if you only want to sell to your own language community. There is not much shared culture between Flemings and Walloons. I have no idea what kind of music, tv shows, movies are popular in Wallonia nor could I tell you the name of 5 famous Walloons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yet we can do business with each other just fine.
realityking 6y ago
While no doubt helpful it’s also completely unrealistic as a number of commenters have pointed out. There are however many things the EU could work on that would help: - common market for financial financial services (why does a FinTech company have to register in every country it wants to do business in?) - common market for media rights (why do I have different rules to license a song or movie in different countries? We don’t need 27 iTunes Stores) - common market for telecommunication (ISPs and mobile operators still function independently even if they share a brand) - common labor market - make it easier to hire across borders (my employer is having a tough time hiring regional employees as we have to get set up in every country with a legal entity and register for taxes, social security) It’s also important to acknowledge how far Europe has gotten. The common Customs area, the Euro, SEPA, Schengen all help make doing business in Europe across countries a lot easier. The also help make talent more mobile as it’s easier to move across borders.
Someone 6y ago
I think you would have to mandate English as the first language to get on level terms with the USA. Most educated Europeans already speak English as a second (or third, fourth, …) language, but many still prefer to be spoken to in their first language (historically often because they don’t speak English that well, but that already has been slowly changing for decades)

ben_w 6y ago

The EU or the nations which are members of the EU? (Current EU VAT rules definitely suck for small multi-nation startups, but the rule as I understand it is “pay VAT where you customers are” which brings me back to the nations themselves rather than the supernational trading block).

Aerroon 6y ago
The VAT rule is on the EU though. It was implemented without much thought about collateral damage. They even forgot to have a minimum threshold for it, which resulted in some online micro businesses shutting down. It took years for them to implement a minimum threshold. As the rules were initially, it encouraged very small digital businesses not to sell to other EU countries. Think about that. You are in the UK. You create knitting patterns that you sell online. Somebody from Latvia wants to purchase your knitting pattern. However, you don't have any other customers from Latvia. You're better off not selling to that customer to avoid the paperwork for VAT to Latvia. This is a digital product that can be copied at nearly no cost. Politicians saw the light at some point and implemented a minimum threshold for VAT for these kinds of payments. I still cannot understand why this took years. From 2015: https://euobserver.com/opinion/129961 https://euobserver.com/opinion/129961 Sorry, but I'm still salty about it.

harryf 6y ago

> EU has done a lot to stifle the tech sector in the EU. Examples? The only thing you might argue is privacy laws and there we could be thankful to the EU for being the only trading block that's made some (perhaps futile) effort to protect their civilians rights.

latch 6y ago

I don't understand what you're saying. First, why can't you "create a tech sector when all your data passes through USA..."? What does one have to do with the other? Are you talking about espionage? If so, is there any evidence that the EU tech sector has been stifled because of US government espionage? Also, this article is about data collection and disinformation. What does that have to do with "build[ing] a moat to stop haemorraging human and capital resources to the US" ?? And, anyways, what exactly has the US done, at a policy / regulatory level to "strategically protect" this?

cblconfederate 6y ago
The US has done (and avoided doing) everything to keep their tech giants getting bigger, from keeping centralized internet infrastructure on US soil to lax privacy laws, to blocking competing payments tech like blockchains, to immigrations law, to providing a good environment for those companies to grow grow grow. It's a strategic choice to dominate IT that has borne fruit, and only China got away. I don't think that was pure accident, just look at the contrast in welfare between the US big tech sector and the US telecom sector.
amoshi 6y ago
>If so, is there any evidence that the EU tech sector has been stifled because of US government espionage? Other sectors have been, and there's no reason tech would be immune to this. Also, it's only logical that attempts to create an EU tech sector, therefore threatening the US dominance, would be met with attempts to stiffle it similar to the ones below. >In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech. >In the early 1990s, the US National Security Agency intercepted the communications between the European aerospace company Airbus and the Saudi Arabian national airline. In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA, acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[65] As a result, the American aerospace company McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing) won the multibillion-dollar contract instead of Airbus. >The American defense contractor Raytheon won a US$1.3 billion contract with the Government of Brazil to monitor the Amazon rainforest after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), acting as a whistleblower, reported that Raytheon's French competitor Thomson-Alcatel had been paying bribes to get the contract. >In order to boost America's position in trade negotiations with the then Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in 1995 the CIA eavesdropped on the conversations between Japanese bureaucrats and executives of car manufacturers Toyota and Nissan. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON You can argue that the bribing cases make the US government the "good guy", but I can safely say that the NSA/CIA would not leverage it's espionage capabilites to subvert a US companies deals/operations. And remember, these are only the cases that we know about.

Joeri 6y ago

The EU cannot create a tech sector like the other blocks because of the cultural barriers. There is no common language and no common media. That means you have to launch country by country, adapting product and marketing strategy for every country. Meanwhile, in the US it is easy to launch a simple product and market it to the entire country. That means US companies are orders of magnitude easier to scale up to behemoths. In fact, if an EU tech company wants to grow really big, it is better off trying to conquer the US (like spotify). There is no fix for this. Even if the EU managed to take away the many regulatory differences between member nations and created a funding source equal to silicon valley, and managed to keep the US tech giants at bay, the EU tech industry will never rival that of the US. IMHO this is a good thing. Megacorporations are an economic antipattern. It is better to have a million small businesses serving their local market than a few giants covering the continent.

cblconfederate 6y ago
That's a common trope but i think it's false. Different languages did not matter for many other industries, autos, foods, tourism, etc. IT is not about making content, it's about hosting it and there are plenty of good hosts in EU. It's not as if europeans learn about europe when they are on US social media anyway. Most of what they hear is about US and Trump, not their local stuff. That hasn't prevented Twitter and FB or ebay or whatever to become huge in europe. Besides far too many europeans do their work in English, hell even Brussels operates in english apart from some public appearances. I ve certainly never used another language in any EU project i joined.

grishka 6y ago

> Russia partly did it Russian government had no part in this. It's just the fact that US companies didn't consider Russia a worthy market back then. So, naturally, we've had our own companies like VKontakte and Yandex copy what the US counterparts had to offer, and when Facebook and Google noticed Russia and tried expanding into it, it was too late.

cblconfederate 6y ago
> when Facebook and Google noticed Russia and tried expanding into it, it was too late. There were competing social networks in europe and UK as well, big names. Why are those in the graveyard though?
- grishka 6y ago
  They probably didn't gain enough traction and network effect before Facebook started its efforts to expand. Just to put that into perspective: by 2010, VKontakte had around 60M users and exceeded 100M by the end of the year. Meanwhile Facebook wasn't even fully translated into Russian, and it was this obscure thing some hipsters used as their secondary social network.
- machiaweliczny 6y ago
  In Poland people switched to Facebook due to network effect and because it's super hard to compete with preinstalled application. Local competitor had 10M users (same as Google usage, 40M country) and lost due to preinstalled FB apps on mobile. We still have local competition to Amazon but I guess days are numbered as they just filled for IPO.