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EU to unveil landmark law curbing power of tech giants
- LC_ALL 6y agoDoes this help big tech or hurt big tech? One way to create a monopoly is to regulate competition out of existence. Lawsuits against big tech are becoming the latest form of semantic satiation.
- m000 6y agoTFA mentions that «Large tech firms would be designated as internet "gatekeepers" — making them subject to stricter regulations.» So the regulation is not horizontal. And it is positive that the EU seem to have learnt a few things from the application of GDPR.
- intricatedetail 6y agoThis very much needed to be implemented worldwide. We have not seen capitalism to have been exploited to such extent, so we need regulation to limit any anomalies. I would go further and require that at a certain scale companies should be divided into smaller ones.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoWhy do you think small companies can't compete with big companies anymore? This is the opposite of capitalism, this is big companies colluding with the government to keep their dominant position and prevent competition. For example, look at how VATMOSS forced sellers to use Amazon / eBay or implement complicated tracking / accounting.
- modo_mario 6y agoVATMOSS is a simplification compared to what they'd have to do before tho, no? Depending on where they were doing business i guess but on average. Additionally you can basically follow only your local countries vat rules up to 10k
- ben_w 6y ago> Additionally you can basically follow only your local countries vat rules up to 10k I don’t think that was originally the case, I think that’s something campaigners managed to get later. I think VATMOSS happened because big companies chose to operate from whichever EU country had the lowest VAT rate, and charged all sales at that VAT rate, which would explain why it happened. But I’m not a lawyer and I wasn’t doing B2C self employment at the time of the change, so don’t take my word for it.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoThere were good reasons to make some changes but €10K isn't very high. My small one person business does that much in several EU countries and I know I'm far from alone in that.
- zo1 6y agoVAT itself was the original "over-complication", so I wouldn't call it a fair comparison. In all cases, it's easy for big companies to follow VAT regulations, but less so for smaller ones.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoIt's not 'any more', the whole body of law on monopolies and mergers is like a 200 years old cornerstone of markets.
- pjc50 6y agoDeutsche Welle's English site looks like a useful one to broaden my news repertoire.
- theodric 6y agoTheir English-language documentaries (see YouTube) are some of the best around
- allendoerfer 6y agoIt is part of the German public broadcasting but as I just learned actually not financed by the fee every German household has to pay. It is financed directly by the German state. I will use this in the future as an example for this simpler (and cheaper) system working just fine.
- codethief 6y ago> It is financed directly by the German state. I would add that despite the funding coming from the government, > The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence [0] Specifically, the supervisory board of Deutsche Welle consists of 7 members that get elected by the parliament and the acting federal government and another 10 members that come from non-profit organizations like labor unions, religious groups, cultural and sports organizations, among others.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle#Aufsichtsgremien https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle#Aufsichtsgremie...
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- jokethrowaway 6y agoOne more law from EU that won't accomplish anything. We should be grateful it doesn't look like they're screwing up small businesses (VATMESS) or the entire internet (cookie law, GDPR, copyright link tax) this time
- StavrosK 6y agoAnother good thing the GDPR is good at is weeding out people's bad opinions. Whenever I see someone saying the GDPR is a net negative, it's a good indication to me that they don't know what they're talking about.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoI'd rather be able to choose my own poison. Just because you care about your online data, it doesn't mean everyone does or should. With the way I use online platforms, the data online giants get from me is mostly useless.
- StavrosK 6y ago"I don't need a good thing, therefore it's bad."
- jokethrowaway 6y agoThe reason I consider it bad is because it introduces a mandatory middleman between two consentient business parts. Just because people don't read contracts, it doesn't mean a nanny state should force companies to behave in a certain way. People can just not use those services or learn to read
- StavrosK 6y agoAgreed, consumer protection laws are overreach, they should just make better people. Why didn't we think of that!
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- Aeolun 6y agoSoon we will see a ‘We are working on making this website accessible to our EU customers’ on the Google homepage :/
- Vespasian 6y agoIf the requirement to be powerful but not almighty proves to be too much for Google I'll be glad to see them go. I do not expect that to happen.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoThe practice you're alluding to is currently restricted to one surprisingly specific segment, which I'll term the 'hillbilly newspaper'. Seriously: I do not remember ever seeing that message, except when clicking a link to some small-town newspaper in a non-coastal US state. But among these newspapers, the rate is somewhere above 50 %. EU visitors are obviously a small fraction of their traffic, which allows them to do this. But there are millions of other websites where that's true. And yet, none of them feel the need to implement geoblocking. I just tried Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and it works fine. So there's something else going on. To cut to the chase, it's publishers being ideological and idiotic: they are trying to make some point about EU imperialism and US sovereignty, by pretending that the EU has powers it doesn't have.
- ben_w 6y ago> So there's something else going on. To cut to the chase, it's publishers being ideological and idiotic: they are trying to make some point about EU imperialism and US sovereignty, by pretending that the EU has powers it doesn't have. Could be, but another explanation is that the newspapers have heard of GDPR and don’t understand it (detailed legalese that they can skip by not serving EU citizens, I can’t really blame them), while Four Seasons Total Landscaping hasn’t even heard of it (weird foreign thing about tech — who cares? We sell spades, not computers!)
- jokethrowaway 6y agoThey have a point, the eu is forcing themselves between service providers and citizens. As a European citizen, I don't want this. It also costs money to implement GDPR
- ckastner 6y agoAs an EU citizen, I'm extremely happy for the way the EU is pushing back on the tech giants. It's empowering. The GDPR, in my opinion, turned out to be a terrific first step (which does not mean it does not have its issues). It's been a rocky two+ years, but most sites are already up to a point where they actually give me a way to express my consent, or (more importantly) to object to processing on grounds of legitimate interest (which is where advertisers come in). And that's just one example. The GDPR starts with the following sentence (in recital 1): The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right. And the EU is living up to it. It's empowering to actually have a say in how one's own data is being processed, rather than just being the product at someone else's mercy. I can only welcome any further steps in this direction. I have no issues with some entity getting rich and powerful, the problem is when they get too powerful.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago>As an EU citizen, I'm extremely happy for the way the EU is pushing back on the tech giants. It's empowering. Let's not kid ourselves, the main reason EU is pushing against them so easily is that they're not European so they have nothing to lose. See how little resistance from the EU, VW and other EU major car manufacturers faced with emission cheating/scandals and the amount of lobbying they do. If Google and Facebook would be locally home grown and provide tens of thousands of well paid jobs and billions in tax revenue to the EU economy, not to mention provide the EU with a global (surveillance)hegemony on tech, it would be safe to assume the EU would let many of the current things slide.
- maest 6y agoThat doesn't counter what the OP said. The EU can empower citizens with anti tech corporate action while also dropping the ball whean dealing with European car manufacturers. It's not either/or.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoThe most GDPR fines are still on European companies fyi: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ It will cost < 1000 € to go after a big tech company that doesn't respect GDPR ( Cfr. If you start it in the Netherlands)
- schmorptron 6y agoIf this gets through and implemented, it's probably gonna affect Google a lot, but I wonder whether they'll also go after Apple with their App Store and the whole Spotify situation, since I don't think I've seen the EU regulators look into that before.
- username90 6y agoEU is already going after apple. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1073 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
- Tokelin 6y agoWhat are you referring to by "Spotify situation"? I'm out of the loop. Could it be the data breaches mentioned here? https://threatpost.com/spotify-changes-passwords-data-breach/162256/ https://threatpost.com/spotify-changes-passwords-data-breach...
- BillyTheKing 6y agoSpotify complained that apples uses its market power as the app-gatekeeper to promote its own services over Spotify's. Afaik, Spotify needs to pay that 30% royalty fee to apple whenever someone signs up to Spotify via the app-store, whereas apple obviously does not have pay itself that fee for its music streaming service. This is the complaint: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1073 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
- p49k 6y agoSpotify has illustrated that they have no qualms themselves in abusing their market power to subvert the fairness/freeness of markets - they're currently pouring massive amounts of resources into an attempt to force themselves into the role of podcasting-gatekeeper. Hope that the EU looks into their own actions as well.
- tazjin 6y agoThe "Spotify situation" is an ongoing argument between Spotify & Apple. Spotify's side: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/ https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/ (this page is theirs) Apple's side: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-claims/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-c...
- Etheryte 6y ago> Tech giants could be entirely banned from the EU market over "serious and repeated breaches of law," AFP reported. If this comes to pass as described, this is a landslide shift in mentality. Paying fines for shady practices will no longer simply be the cost of doing business, but there's a real risk of being locked out of a major market.
- OneGuy123 6y agoWhat I'm afraid is that sooner or later they will ramp up these laws until Europens are by law forbidden to use these products...
- BlueTemplar 6y agoI hope they do. That would allow EU competitors to appear and grow (at which point the GAFAMs can be let in again).
- OneGuy123 6y agoYou are shortsighted if you don't know what this would lead to...
- jokethrowaway 6y agoSure, people will love the party that got Google or Facebook banned
- tester34 6y agoSomebody has to commit hard decisions in order to get rid of USA based overseers.
- phtrivier 6y agoThat's the beauty of it being an EU-level regulation: each national party can plausibly deny being "the party that got Facebook banned", and pretends it's "because of those technocrats in Brussels." That being said, of course Google and FB are never going to be banned in the EU. They'll lobby to death to get the regulation to be "reasonable", and they'll mostly comply because they want their part of the advertising market, and they'll pay the fines when they get caught.
- tpush 6y ago> Companies favoring their own services could be outlawed. Apple would have to significantly redesign their entire OSs if this comes to pass. Will be really interesting to see!
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoThere are a lot of unexpected side effects lurking in those sort of decisions. For example Apple developed Pages, Numbers and Keynote because nobody else was able to compete against Microsoft. It's hard to see the computing environment would be better off without those products. You can argue that someone else would fill that gap but they didn't really seem to be doing that before Apple stepped in. In fact I would guess that Apple would have preferred not to have developed them, it's not as if they generate any direct revenue.
- Zeing0Ch 6y agoWhats even the point of becoming a Google or Apple if then some clueless bureaucrat gets to tell you what you are allowed to do with your market position? Nobody is stopping other companies to build their own Android or iPhone, its working as intended, no reason to do anything.
- young_unixer 6y agoYup. I'm waiting for an Iphone/Android competitor, but all of incumbents are half-baked solutions. The sanest thing you can do is use LineageOS, but I can't really trust the LineageOS team since the april fools fiasco. The lack of a third option is simply because of incompetence, not monopoly.
- young_unixer 6y agoI said incumbent, but I meant the opposite. Stupid me.
- avianlyric 6y ago> Whats even the point of becoming a Google or Apple if then some clueless bureaucrat gets to tell you what you are allowed to do with your market position? I think you may have inadvertently stumbled on the point of these laws. The EU doesn't want companies getting to Google or Apple scale, and all the power that amasses with it, without it being possible to ensure they're holding up EU ideals, rather than their own.
- TruthHurts44 6y agoOh no, just stop doing this EU!
- JacobiX 6y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, I think that unlike some other markets (China and to some extent other Asian countries / Russia / etc) it's surprising how dependent the EU is on US corporations for digital services. As said the EU anti-monopolies chief Margrethe Vestager: "In the past few weeks we have all been fascinated by what is possible digitally. But the coronavirus showed how dependent we are on US corporations, and that was a wake-up call,".
- DharmaPolice 6y agoI might be overthinking this but I find her wording a bit concerning if they weren't fully awake to this dependency pre-pandemic. Everyone knows where Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple are based and these companies generally are operating under their own names so it's not like a shady conglomerate who owns everything without you realising. Anecdotal and hardly conclusive but I work in UK local government and we get a weekly email from our web proxy showing the top 50 domains by proxy traffic in that period. The usual split is something like 42 domains that are linked to US companies, 5 are UK companies with the remainder being the rest of the world (including the EU). That's been the case for years now.
- Sambdala 6y agoIt gives cover to those who dismissed the concern pre-covid. It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.
- cblconfederate 6y agoI think you're correct. Most EU politicians did not work with technology a lot, they prefered travelling and having chats with cabernet and camembert. Surely the pandemic forced them to use some more tech.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoYeah, that doesn't make any sense with all the poltician's discussions over the recent years about the GAFA tax. (Whoopsie, we dropped the M. Can't be antagonizing the maker of our hospital and army software!)
- blue_devil 6y agoEU-wide regulation might make sense to give a "stick" to existing giants, but what about creating an EU-wide "carrot" for European companies to become giants (in the form of unified market and capital)? Ms. Vestager kind of glosses over this (2:40 min into the interview video).
- paganel 6y agoIt’s hard to become an European unified Internet market because of the language barriers.
- magicalhippo 6y agoLocal laws and regulation is a bigger issue I think. Yes EU unifies a lot of things, but also leaves a lot of details up to the individual nations which means things aren't quite as similar as one might imagine.
- bserge 6y agoOK, bear with me here. So, a US company can create a huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't? Seems that language and regulations are not the barriers here. Even US companies aren't that "unified", they're hailing from a specific state (often California) and have nothing to do with the other 49. You could easily swap "California" with "Germany". Looks to me like access to capital and risk aversion are the biggest problems. Always have been. The UK is by far the best place for a startup in Europe, and I'd wager that will stay the same even after Brexit, as long as every other country has this obsession with saving cash and not investing in risky business, or any business at all. Localization is easy, getting millions for a startup is hard. And God forbid you fail, you will very likely never get any funding from anyone in the EU and will have to move to the US. Such a waste of entrepreneurs.
- paganel 6y ago> huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't? Yes, because that US company was already big in the first place thanks to its foothold in the US (a single-language market). The same thing was starting to happen with AliExpress just before the pandemic but I'm not so sure how things stand right now (politics-wise, mostly). It's pretty hard close to impossible to become a "google" or "facebook" in the local German or French markets big enough to conquer the rest of the continent. Spotify and the rest of the similar European products have had the success that they encountered precisely because they focused on an international (i.e. English-speaking) market first.
- chewz 6y ago> Facebook and other firms have warned that the more regulation could prompt the company to move away from Europe, which could cost jobs and block access to its site for EU users. Please, please make it happen...
- Zenst 6y agoWell put it like this: In China the government dictate what you can see and the EU approach is that the government legislate what you can be shown. I don't see any of the major players having a hissy fit and walking away from that kinda user-base. Though the prospect of large companies hiding behind firewalls to protect themselves from EU users, does bemuse me.
- robotburrito 6y agoWouldn't this just lead to EU version of facebook creating more wealth for the EU instead of shipping it off to the US? Am I missing something?
- absolutelyrad 6y agoList of companies that I'd like to be investigated for corruption and anti trust abuses: 1. Alphabet/Google 2. Apple 3. Facebook 4. Match Group Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking. Reasons: For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs. For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem. For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities. For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS. --- From the Chinese side: I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated. ----------- Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry. The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two. For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.
- FreakyT 6y agoI'd still put Facebook as the #1 issue, since WhatsApp and Instagram clearly should exist separately. Google seems iffier, since Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us). Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.
- apexalpha 6y agoMozilla is still around, though?
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
- cblconfederate 6y agoThis one actually sounds useful for european tech, if applied correctly, and might even benefit tech overall.
- bpsh 6y agoI would be skeptical about this, the EU is great at speaking loudly with a tiny stick
- IronRanger 6y agoIt would be more effective to just regulate the maximum % commission that these platforms are allowed to charge. Set it at 5% for developers located in the EU, and be done with regulation forever. But - this method doesn't allow for over-regulation, over-government, and megafines. The benefits go to small and medium-sized European businesses, instead of the European bureaucrat class, so its a no-go.
- Proven 6y agoInstead of "curbing the power of tech giants", read that for what it is, which is "increasing the power of the State and its unelected bureaucrats"
- WClayFerguson 6y agoThe biggest problem that needs to be addressed by legislation is the "censorship" issue. Obviously if I'm some small shop the gov't shouldn't get involved in how my servers operate, but once you become a large public general purpose messaging company, like Twitter for example, with millions of users, you've crosses a threshold where you should be treated similar to a phone company insofar as your legal right to arbitrarily censor perfectly legal speech. I urge anyone who disagrees to just watch Joe Rogan episode with Tim Pool and Jack Dorsey where it all comes out into the light. If phone companies started terminating service or interfering in any way with communications, the courts would immediately intervene to stop it. The main epiphany all Americans need to have is that these Big Tech companies are identical to phone providers in every way that matters, when it comes to censorship rules.
- marstall 6y agoif twitter blocks you, you can publish your stuff on myriad other services for free. i guess same with a phone company, if they cut you off you can just sign up with another provider ... is it censorship if the phone company cuts you off for non-payment?
- adventured 6y agoIf Twitter were acting strictly alone, that might be a reasonable point. In the case of Facebook, they possess monopoly power and their ability to censor speech is elevated above most of their peers (save for Google). Twitter however did not act alone. The tech giants conspired together to mass censor speech they politically disagree with in the 2020 presidential election. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's not secret in any regard, they were openly and directly sharing block lists with eachother and acting against only the political party they consider their adversary (rather than equitably enforcing their terms of service, behavior that has been going on for years now). Their executives should be in prison for that level of criminal collusion toward election interference given their extreme collective monopoly status. Merely breaking the companies into pieces is not enough.
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- tw10e4c36c2317 6y agoIn short, people don't like a deal, and rather than walking away (which they are free to do), they want a well-armed third party to alter the deal. I see a lot of critiques about "bundling", but the fact is every deal is a package deal. Force Apple to allow installing a non-Safari browser; you're still running iOS, you're still using Broadcom chips, you're still indirectly supporting the CCP, etc. But good for Apple because these token changes keep people from leaving their product altogether. The sad irony is that these actions will further entrench established firms by diminishing/obviating competitive advantages of would-be competitors, and/or yield worse outcomes for consumers. This has been the case throughout the entire history of "anti-trust" law. Aside: Competing is not "anti-competitive". A "competitive market" is not determined by counting extant competitors, but by whether or not would-be competitors are interfered with by third-parties.
- zoobab 6y agoOnly INTEROPERABILITY will scare them.
- mikesabbagh 6y agoWhat I dont understand is why they keep allowing mergers for those huge companies in the first place. Maybe there should be a certain company size where they are not allowed to merge with new companies any more!!
- meesles 6y agoI think a majority of mergers 'just happen' because they are not challenged. To stop a merger, some regulating body needs to hear about it and take action in time. They can also investigate and dismantle monopolies after the fact, but then we see long legal battles. Also size-based limits would be hard to create/enforce. IBM has about 350K employees wordwide. McDonalds has about 200K. Google has about 100K. Amazon 1.1M. Do you look at market cap? The industry specifically? It's a complex problem, that's why there is no simple solution.
- Kalium 6y agoA lot of large mergers and acquisitons were, in fact, reviewed and approved by bodies that exist to do precisely that. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was reviewed. I expect their acquisition of Whatsapp was as well.
- MakersF 6y agoOf course it was reviewed, it's when they provided misleading information on the usage of data, and later got fined for it. "Mergers: Commission fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_1369 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
- uCantCauseUCant 6y agoI wish there was some entrepreneurial, natural way to split up monopolies. Some section chief of a company has proof of monopolistic behaviour, he goes to court, and walks away as CEO of a "split-up" section. No damage to the companys structure, operation-ability from day one... For the shareholders, to bet on monopolies should always be a bad bet.
- ur-whale 6y agoMore "accept all cookies" buttons on every web site. Yay. [edit]: looks like the brits jumped ship just in time.
- hfkldjsjfkdj 6y agoThe EU is only good at hindering progress these days. The tech market here is extremely dry with only ARM and DeepMind being the only non-gaming tech companies that come to mind that are actually relevant, with DeepMind needing the backing outside of the EU to be where it's at today and ARM being bought by NVIDIA. The way you improve the tech scene is by providing better alternatives. Music piracy was reduced through services like Spotify rather than some business/political people getting sites 'removed'. Elon Musk creates OpenAI with the goal of building safe AGI, the JS creator created Brave for privacy. Good luck trying to start any of these projects here. Laws that try to moderate only create a chase that goes in circles. They are not a solution.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoThis is fantastic. These companies need the EU as badly as the EU needs them, and its about time there was a flex from the other side.
- whalesalad 6y agoAs we see more and more companies leave the EU under increased regulation I wonder what kind of potential will exist in the void. GDPR for instance caused a lot of smaller players to peace out entirely. The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese comes to mind.
- droobles 6y agoI have a naive question: In this regulated market, where is the line drawn in relation to which companies one entity can acquire? It seems that IG wanted to sell to FaceBook and the government blessed it, same with Google's acquisitions but I do not know much about the process of purchasing a company. Also what does the HN community think will happen to the "Get big fast then exit" strategy if these conglomerates get busted up? Will that SV investor scene die or change? I'm already seeing the rise of bootstrappers and the term lifestyle business no longer being a "lesser-than" moniker. Just what's on my mind this morning, would love good discussion.
- young_unixer 6y agoInstead of big companies buying smaller ones, big ones would just clone them (either integrating them into their existing product or creating a new product) and beat them.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago> Companies with over 45 million EU users would be designated as digital "gatekeepers" — making them subject to stricter regulations. Do "shadow profiles" of people who never registered but have data collected on them count towards this?
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago"curbing the power of tech giants" sounds harmless doesn't it? but when the end-game is to also break encryption: "> Europe adopts resolution on security through and “security despite” despite encryption" see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429373 it becomes a lot different and realistic goal to achieve. "think DRM!" too. Lawful Interception on "legal comms channels" are then the norm, and e2ee (because it breaks LI) is illegal.
- martindbp 6y agoI've come to realize this: free markets of winner-take-all products are a losing game for Europe. We're too late to the game, we can't compete with these huge companies, and there's no way to catch up in terms of venture capital. There are structural difficulties, namely that there are 50 very different countries on this continent with completely different languages and cultures. There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups. As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won't be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of "fairness" of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.
- xxpor 6y agoThat seems awfully defeatist. Spotify is winning in music, for example. And that's certainly a case where the different languages make a big difference. European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that's the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn't foster risk taking.
- martindbp 6y ago> That seems awfully defeatist. Spotify is winning in music, for example I'm just a realist. Spotify is not big by comparison. I just looked up a list of the 30 most highly valuated America, and the least valuable was bigger than Spotify. > European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate I've lived in both and it's just no comparison. What differences you find within the US you find within single European countries. The fact is that an American startup can target a huge, homogeneous and rich country with barely any extra work.
- wayoutthere 6y ago> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that's the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn't foster risk taking. It's also a lot different than American culture -- I've long maintained that as far as cultural attitudes and preferences go, a person from New York has more in common with someone from Mexico City or Sao Paolo than someone from Paris or London.
- tobbob 6y agoHow convenient. Just as the UK leaves a big gap in their budget, they've just realised that all these mega wealthy companies are actually breaking a bunch of EU laws they've just thought up, and will have to pay the EU lots of money, it's the only way to redress the harm of course.