7 ms·

I'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 c

I'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 ago
That 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.
  - jawzz 6y ago
    > 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. Interesting—do you mind expanding on this?
- avianlyric 6y ago
  > Spotify is winning in music, for example. Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle. It quite possible for the statement "the US have greater cultural homogeneity than the EU" to true alongside the statement: > European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And I would argue that's exactly the case. Having been in startup that seriously looked at expanding in the US vs expanding in the rest of the EU (it expanded into the US), I'm confident to say the US is far more homogenous. Interestingly that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easier for an EU company to expand the US rather than the EU. But it does mean that EU startups have a much larger bump in the road than US companies when they're expanding.
  - meragrin_ 6y ago
    > Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle. Large in roads amongst Apple customers or large in roads to the general market?
- fumar 6y ago
  Spotify has advertising and does sell its abilities to target segments of users.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Scandinavian countries have higher rates of entrepreneurship the US. No one cares about that though...
  - xxpor 6y ago
    This fits in with my pet theory that universal healthcare would actually result in a huge explosion of entrepreneurship in the US.
briga 6y ago
Perhaps it's a losing game for Europe because Europe isn't really a free market. European powers have constantly been imposing all sorts of taxes, restrictions, and sanctions on tech companies that make it an inhospitable place for tech companies to start out. Its telling that many of the European countries that have managed to produce successful startups are those which had to rebuild from scratch after WWII or after the USSR fell. Elsewhere government is too big for its own good and just seems to stifle innovation. America was successful in the 20th century largely because it was so far removed from large and stagnant European governments. Likewise, west coast tech companies are arguably successful today in part because of their distance from an increasingly bloated Washington. Regulations kill innovation.
- martindbp 6y ago
  These are definitely important factors, and Europe would be in much better shape if it did things right. But I think the geographical features are more important. An American company can grow big locally and then wash over the European market when it's reached maturity. In the meantime, European startups start off in their tiny local market, perhaps 10M, unable to compete in the US, but not big enough to easily expand to the rest of Europe. If for some reason you still succeed, now you have to recruit tens of thousands of people to move to your tiny little country, with a different culture and language. It's not easy to recruit people to move to Stockholm to work for Spotify, not only because of the weather, but also because who wants to spend the energy to learn Swedish for a single job? The alternative is to never really integrate into society.
  - amaccuish 6y ago
    > to your tiny little country Well China would like to have a word with about your "tiny little" country. A world exists outside of the borders of the USA. There"s always someone bigger than you so "tiny little" is usually not a good platform for an argument. > If for some reason you still succeed, now you have to recruit tens of thousands of people to move to your tiny little country Further, the idea that all employees of one company must work in one country is clearly not the case. Or did globalisation not happen? > but also because who wants to spend the energy to learn Swedish for a single job Whilst not in huge numbers, generalisations such as this also do not help your argument.
Barrin92 6y ago
>we can't compete the issue is even deeper. You can't compete without recreating the same issues that those giants already have in the US or China. I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much. I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on. Companies like this will never compete with American or Chinese giants in a 'free market'. It's like having a green energy company compete with companies that can legally pour their waste into the river. The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. Don't copy "maximal consumer welfare" doctrines or prioritise convenience, promote decentralisation. It looks like there's some good stuff in these new laws, but they don't go far enough yet.
- cabalamat 6y ago
  > I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much. I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth' The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. There's two things the EU could do here: force big companies to split up (so they can't favour their own services) and require social networks to be interoperable (using ActivityPub or similar).
- didibus 6y ago
  > I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on Why would smaller companies be better positioned for those things?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    because a larger number of smaller companies increases competition, meaning users can realistically leave, making firms accountable to their community (ask yourself why discourse on HN or a mastodon instance is more civil than on Facebook, for example). More human-scale size enables human content moderation. any given smaller company is non-essential, meaning it cannot challenge lawmakers on the grounds of being essential, or bully lawmakers into submission. Smallness also incentivises business models that aren't data-analytics driven because small companies simply lack huge pools of user-data, hopefully diminishing the toxic surveillance-capital model of predominantly large firms.
cabalamat 6y ago
> There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups. I don't see why not. The EU's GDP is almost as big as the USA's, and the EU has plenty of educated people who understand the relevant technologies. > 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. Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.
- martindbp 6y ago
  > I don't see why not. Try convincing tens of thousands of engineers to learn Polish, Estonian or Dutch. Some will do it, or are fine living in a country without speaking the language, but surely it puts a wet blanket on job market mobility. It's a hard sell: "Come to Stockholm to work with us, learn a new language that is useless anywhere else, and adapt to our culture or be forever an outsider. Oh, and your next job might be in Denmark, so do it all over again." Google has 120,000 employees today. You may find half of that in Germany, France or the UK, but not in the rest of the 40-ish countries scattered throughout the continent. > Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems. Totally agree, especially chips. This one is the hardest though.
  - samus 6y ago
    Language requirements for tech jobs are often very relaxed. For many companies, English is sufficient, and if one spends enough time in a country to build a career, one will also learn to at least understand the language. In certain big, hip cities this might not even be necessary. By the way, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar to each other, and they are not tricky at all compared to German or Dutch. Most other rich EU countries are large enough that learning their language opens up lots of career possibilities. Eastern Europe is a different story. Many do well, but these countries still tend to suffer from a net brain drain towards the richer countries.
- kybernetikos 6y ago
wazoox 6y ago
Russia, with a GDP about equivalent to Spain's, successfully nurtured its own infrastructure, search engine, social network, etc. The only thing hampering EU until now was lack of political will.
- gvdexile9 6y ago
  Russia is very different from a block of many countries with their own language/own culture...
  - wazoox 6y ago
    Of course. However Russia shows what a single country of 150 millions inhabitants can do. There is enough money and potential users in German-speaking countries, or French-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking countries, etc to achieve similar outcomes easily.
satellite2 6y ago
It's an interesting perspective but it doesn't quite capture the relationship here. I believe most of those big companies fed from Europe but not only from a market perspective but from a technological perspective. Contrary to what the media try to depict, most of the tech on which those companies are built were designed in Europe and most of the brain that lead them studied in Europe. I believe Americans are the best to market an idea, as they mostly focus on optimizing for the product market fit. Which produce the biggest market capitalizations. But long term planning is still mostly done in Europe as it's considered too expensive almost everwhere else in the world, particularly in the states where remnants from the cold war makes the concept of the government pooling money to fund big projects a politicaly incorrect idea. So the next logical step will be that like last time Americans will not produce anything meaningful for next 20 years which will give the time to Europe to capitalize on their previous innovations and to produce the next generation of ideas, and the cycle will repeat. But if we wanted to increase the pace of those innovations, some bipartite solutions could be imagined...
- vladb38b 6y ago
  I am European and I live in the US. I would like to ask for more proof of your assertion that most of the tech on which big tech is built originated in Europe. In the US it is taken for granted that there has been a virtuous cycle between public research money, research universities, venture capital and tech companies. My impression is that most of the tech originates in this ecosystem.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 6y ago
> 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. These 50 countries are so different (sarcasm) culturally and linguistically that in every single one of them almost everybody uses the same Google ;-) I wouldn't mind using a Dutch search engine or a Portuguese social network if they were nearly as good. I don't understand how is it harder to engineer a better search engine (or anything) in the EU than in the US.

xxpor 6y ago

That 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.
- jawzz 6y ago
  > 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. Interesting—do you mind expanding on this?
avianlyric 6y ago
> Spotify is winning in music, for example. Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle. It quite possible for the statement "the US have greater cultural homogeneity than the EU" to true alongside the statement: > European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And I would argue that's exactly the case. Having been in startup that seriously looked at expanding in the US vs expanding in the rest of the EU (it expanded into the US), I'm confident to say the US is far more homogenous. Interestingly that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easier for an EU company to expand the US rather than the EU. But it does mean that EU startups have a much larger bump in the road than US companies when they're expanding.
- meragrin_ 6y ago
  > Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle. Large in roads amongst Apple customers or large in roads to the general market?
fumar 6y ago
Spotify has advertising and does sell its abilities to target segments of users.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Scandinavian countries have higher rates of entrepreneurship the US. No one cares about that though...
- xxpor 6y ago
  This fits in with my pet theory that universal healthcare would actually result in a huge explosion of entrepreneurship in the US.

briga 6y ago

Perhaps it's a losing game for Europe because Europe isn't really a free market. European powers have constantly been imposing all sorts of taxes, restrictions, and sanctions on tech companies that make it an inhospitable place for tech companies to start out. Its telling that many of the European countries that have managed to produce successful startups are those which had to rebuild from scratch after WWII or after the USSR fell. Elsewhere government is too big for its own good and just seems to stifle innovation. America was successful in the 20th century largely because it was so far removed from large and stagnant European governments. Likewise, west coast tech companies are arguably successful today in part because of their distance from an increasingly bloated Washington. Regulations kill innovation.

martindbp 6y ago
These are definitely important factors, and Europe would be in much better shape if it did things right. But I think the geographical features are more important. An American company can grow big locally and then wash over the European market when it's reached maturity. In the meantime, European startups start off in their tiny local market, perhaps 10M, unable to compete in the US, but not big enough to easily expand to the rest of Europe. If for some reason you still succeed, now you have to recruit tens of thousands of people to move to your tiny little country, with a different culture and language. It's not easy to recruit people to move to Stockholm to work for Spotify, not only because of the weather, but also because who wants to spend the energy to learn Swedish for a single job? The alternative is to never really integrate into society.
- amaccuish 6y ago
  > to your tiny little country Well China would like to have a word with about your "tiny little" country. A world exists outside of the borders of the USA. There"s always someone bigger than you so "tiny little" is usually not a good platform for an argument. > If for some reason you still succeed, now you have to recruit tens of thousands of people to move to your tiny little country Further, the idea that all employees of one company must work in one country is clearly not the case. Or did globalisation not happen? > but also because who wants to spend the energy to learn Swedish for a single job Whilst not in huge numbers, generalisations such as this also do not help your argument.

Barrin92 6y ago

>we can't compete the issue is even deeper. You can't compete without recreating the same issues that those giants already have in the US or China. I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much. I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on. Companies like this will never compete with American or Chinese giants in a 'free market'. It's like having a green energy company compete with companies that can legally pour their waste into the river. The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. Don't copy "maximal consumer welfare" doctrines or prioritise convenience, promote decentralisation. It looks like there's some good stuff in these new laws, but they don't go far enough yet.

cabalamat 6y ago
> I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much. I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth' The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. There's two things the EU could do here: force big companies to split up (so they can't favour their own services) and require social networks to be interoperable (using ActivityPub or similar).
didibus 6y ago
> I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on Why would smaller companies be better positioned for those things?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  because a larger number of smaller companies increases competition, meaning users can realistically leave, making firms accountable to their community (ask yourself why discourse on HN or a mastodon instance is more civil than on Facebook, for example). More human-scale size enables human content moderation. any given smaller company is non-essential, meaning it cannot challenge lawmakers on the grounds of being essential, or bully lawmakers into submission. Smallness also incentivises business models that aren't data-analytics driven because small companies simply lack huge pools of user-data, hopefully diminishing the toxic surveillance-capital model of predominantly large firms.

cabalamat 6y ago

> There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups. I don't see why not. The EU's GDP is almost as big as the USA's, and the EU has plenty of educated people who understand the relevant technologies. > 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. Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.

martindbp 6y ago
> I don't see why not. Try convincing tens of thousands of engineers to learn Polish, Estonian or Dutch. Some will do it, or are fine living in a country without speaking the language, but surely it puts a wet blanket on job market mobility. It's a hard sell: "Come to Stockholm to work with us, learn a new language that is useless anywhere else, and adapt to our culture or be forever an outsider. Oh, and your next job might be in Denmark, so do it all over again." Google has 120,000 employees today. You may find half of that in Germany, France or the UK, but not in the rest of the 40-ish countries scattered throughout the continent. > Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems. Totally agree, especially chips. This one is the hardest though.
- samus 6y ago
  Language requirements for tech jobs are often very relaxed. For many companies, English is sufficient, and if one spends enough time in a country to build a career, one will also learn to at least understand the language. In certain big, hip cities this might not even be necessary. By the way, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are very similar to each other, and they are not tricky at all compared to German or Dutch. Most other rich EU countries are large enough that learning their language opens up lots of career possibilities. Eastern Europe is a different story. Many do well, but these countries still tend to suffer from a net brain drain towards the richer countries.
kybernetikos 6y ago

wazoox 6y ago

Russia, with a GDP about equivalent to Spain's, successfully nurtured its own infrastructure, search engine, social network, etc. The only thing hampering EU until now was lack of political will.

gvdexile9 6y ago
Russia is very different from a block of many countries with their own language/own culture...
- wazoox 6y ago
  Of course. However Russia shows what a single country of 150 millions inhabitants can do. There is enough money and potential users in German-speaking countries, or French-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking countries, etc to achieve similar outcomes easily.

satellite2 6y ago

It's an interesting perspective but it doesn't quite capture the relationship here. I believe most of those big companies fed from Europe but not only from a market perspective but from a technological perspective. Contrary to what the media try to depict, most of the tech on which those companies are built were designed in Europe and most of the brain that lead them studied in Europe. I believe Americans are the best to market an idea, as they mostly focus on optimizing for the product market fit. Which produce the biggest market capitalizations. But long term planning is still mostly done in Europe as it's considered too expensive almost everwhere else in the world, particularly in the states where remnants from the cold war makes the concept of the government pooling money to fund big projects a politicaly incorrect idea. So the next logical step will be that like last time Americans will not produce anything meaningful for next 20 years which will give the time to Europe to capitalize on their previous innovations and to produce the next generation of ideas, and the cycle will repeat. But if we wanted to increase the pace of those innovations, some bipartite solutions could be imagined...

vladb38b 6y ago
I am European and I live in the US. I would like to ask for more proof of your assertion that most of the tech on which big tech is built originated in Europe. In the US it is taken for granted that there has been a virtuous cycle between public research money, research universities, venture capital and tech companies. My impression is that most of the tech originates in this ecosystem.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

qwerty456127 6y ago

> 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. These 50 countries are so different (sarcasm) culturally and linguistically that in every single one of them almost everybody uses the same Google ;-) I wouldn't mind using a Dutch search engine or a Portuguese social network if they were nearly as good. I don't understand how is it harder to engineer a better search engine (or anything) in the EU than in the US.