4 ms·

Ridiculous. You just can't buy innovation. You have to set up the right environment for it

88840-8855 6y ago
Agree. But this would mean: follow the China approach. - close the market - limits or ban American products. there is no reason why Amazon or Google cannot be copied and made better. 2 main objectives i see there: - protectionism and ban of American stuff speaks against our "transatlanic"""friendship""" and our "common" values meme - we have a terrible fragmented market. chinese have a 1.4bn people population, Americans do have almost 400m. Try to make an app here in Europe for 20 languages, 20 law systems. it's a nightmare.
- worldofmatthew 6y ago
  What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The EU has caused this for themselves. It is nearly impossible to start a small tech company in the EU, due to the vaugeness of the GDPR (Yes, I know people will claim it helps privacy but people are not willing to pay for online content so it will be unprofitable in the EU). Not even going into the future plans of the EU to "regelate" tech that make it literally impossible to start the next Google or Youtube.
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    Nothing would stop them and they would retaliate. This is nothing new though - there are import taxes on airplanes, cars, steel and many other products from Europe.
  - adventured 6y ago
    > What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The US would of course immediately respond in kind. The EU's actions would essentially eliminate the WTO and any pretense that there is a system of functional global trade or globalism; it would amplify the notion that we've entered a new era of hyper nationalism. The EU bet would be: the US benefits a lot more from its tech dominance in Europe, than the EU benefits from having the US tech companies in the EU. That's a correct bet. The more serious problem is, the only proper and fair response is to ban all EU products across the board from the US market so as to match the scale of the economic limitation (given the US dominance in tech is so outsized). Just banning EU tech from the US wouldn't be nearly enough. Since it would be declaring a new era of overt nationalism, the US should also then pull all troops and military gear from EU member nations, revoke all military alliances with EU members, void NATO, and tell Russia to have as much fun as it wants to with Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia, Moldova, Romania and the Baltics. Declare that the US no longer has any interest in Europe's security, the US will not interfere; declare annexation season open. Russia will almost immediately begin taking territory from its neighbors (in all sorts of contrived ways). In net this will massively increase the cost of defense for all EU members, will weaken the EU as a value proposition (Russia will offer a security blanket if you join their side, which some will go for), and will severely burden their economies. This will de facto destroy the EU dream, gradually splitting Europe backward into West and East. Unfortunately what would also happen next, is the US would perceive the EU as a hostile competing power. To the hawks in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US system, that would put toppling weaker governments in Europe back on the table as a reasonable exercise (as in the immediate post WW2 decades), to attempt to install governments more favorable to the US. This would cause severe chaos and instability all over Europe and also new European wars inevitably.
    - petre 6y ago
      The US is already in the process of moving bases from Turkey into Poland and Romania. Those states cannot count on the EU for defense against Russia and they're already on good terms with the US, UK and Israel. The US also needs more reliable allies than Turkey in the Black Sea basin. Turkey was conveniently close to Iran and Russia but thanks to Edrogan's ambitions it fell out with the US.
fulafel 6y ago
There's a long and rich history of government funding R&D in Europe and it's pretty well known what it works for. (And innovations in the conventional definition, meaning incremental refinements of technological solutions, pretty much trickle out every time you pay r&d to work on something) I'm betting this will (among other things) result in open source work on stuff like CEPH, OpenStack, etc.
libertine 6y ago
>You just can't buy innovation. You have to set up the right environment for it When US companies come to EU to buy companies, they are literally buying innovation.
- tupputuppu 6y ago
  They are buying customers, and will typically fade out the European IPRs in lieu of American. The innovations are most of the time American, they're just buying companies to speed up the scaling.
  - libertine 6y ago
    >They are buying customers What? No they're not. They're buying everything: customers, IP, tech, you name it. And you can see that by a simple Google search.
Matthias247 6y ago
You can at least make sure your brightest and most innovative engineers don't run away into other countries, because they pay 5x as much. That would definitely would be a start towards getting great products. However unfortunately there is a far more realistic chance that most of that money will get lost in management spheres which have never seen a single line of code.

Agree. But this would mean: follow the China approach. - close the market - limits or ban American products. there is no reason why Amazon or Google cannot be copied and made better. 2 main objectives i see there: - protectionism and ban of American stuff speaks against our "transatlanic"""friendship""" and our "common" values meme - we have a terrible fragmented market. chinese have a 1.4bn people population, Americans do have almost 400m. Try to make an app here in Europe for 20 languages, 20 law systems. it's a nightmare.

worldofmatthew 6y ago
What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The EU has caused this for themselves. It is nearly impossible to start a small tech company in the EU, due to the vaugeness of the GDPR (Yes, I know people will claim it helps privacy but people are not willing to pay for online content so it will be unprofitable in the EU). Not even going into the future plans of the EU to "regelate" tech that make it literally impossible to start the next Google or Youtube.
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  Nothing would stop them and they would retaliate. This is nothing new though - there are import taxes on airplanes, cars, steel and many other products from Europe.
- adventured 6y ago
  > What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The US would of course immediately respond in kind. The EU's actions would essentially eliminate the WTO and any pretense that there is a system of functional global trade or globalism; it would amplify the notion that we've entered a new era of hyper nationalism. The EU bet would be: the US benefits a lot more from its tech dominance in Europe, than the EU benefits from having the US tech companies in the EU. That's a correct bet. The more serious problem is, the only proper and fair response is to ban all EU products across the board from the US market so as to match the scale of the economic limitation (given the US dominance in tech is so outsized). Just banning EU tech from the US wouldn't be nearly enough. Since it would be declaring a new era of overt nationalism, the US should also then pull all troops and military gear from EU member nations, revoke all military alliances with EU members, void NATO, and tell Russia to have as much fun as it wants to with Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia, Moldova, Romania and the Baltics. Declare that the US no longer has any interest in Europe's security, the US will not interfere; declare annexation season open. Russia will almost immediately begin taking territory from its neighbors (in all sorts of contrived ways). In net this will massively increase the cost of defense for all EU members, will weaken the EU as a value proposition (Russia will offer a security blanket if you join their side, which some will go for), and will severely burden their economies. This will de facto destroy the EU dream, gradually splitting Europe backward into West and East. Unfortunately what would also happen next, is the US would perceive the EU as a hostile competing power. To the hawks in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US system, that would put toppling weaker governments in Europe back on the table as a reasonable exercise (as in the immediate post WW2 decades), to attempt to install governments more favorable to the US. This would cause severe chaos and instability all over Europe and also new European wars inevitably.
  - petre 6y ago
    The US is already in the process of moving bases from Turkey into Poland and Romania. Those states cannot count on the EU for defense against Russia and they're already on good terms with the US, UK and Israel. The US also needs more reliable allies than Turkey in the Black Sea basin. Turkey was conveniently close to Iran and Russia but thanks to Edrogan's ambitions it fell out with the US.

fulafel 6y ago

There's a long and rich history of government funding R&D in Europe and it's pretty well known what it works for. (And innovations in the conventional definition, meaning incremental refinements of technological solutions, pretty much trickle out every time you pay r&d to work on something) I'm betting this will (among other things) result in open source work on stuff like CEPH, OpenStack, etc.

libertine 6y ago

>You just can't buy innovation. You have to set up the right environment for it When US companies come to EU to buy companies, they are literally buying innovation.

tupputuppu 6y ago
They are buying customers, and will typically fade out the European IPRs in lieu of American. The innovations are most of the time American, they're just buying companies to speed up the scaling.
- libertine 6y ago
  >They are buying customers What? No they're not. They're buying everything: customers, IP, tech, you name it. And you can see that by a simple Google search.

Matthias247 6y ago

You can at least make sure your brightest and most innovative engineers don't run away into other countries, because they pay 5x as much. That would definitely would be a start towards getting great products. However unfortunately there is a far more realistic chance that most of that money will get lost in management spheres which have never seen a single line of code.