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As long as GDPR exists, a European tech company than can challenge FANG dominance will never emerge.

pyrale 5y ago
There are many other reasons why large tech companies have a hard time emerging in Europe. One could argue that none of the really big tech companies that emerged in the US is recent either. So it makes sense, if companies can't be helped, for EU to at least try to protect the consumers.
- adventured 5y ago
  > One could argue that none of the really big tech companies that emerged in the US is recent either. That can't be reasonably argued. The US has dozens of large tech companies that have emerged more recently than the classic big tech giants. The EU, or Europe more broadly, has exceptionally few. More recently, for large tech companies, is the past ~20 years. It typically takes a long time to become worth $20 billion or $50b or $100b. That time frame excludes Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Adobe, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, Dell/Emc, Vmware, Salesforce, PayPal, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Verisign, Intuit, IBM, HP, Autodesk, eBay, Booking, Expedia, Cadence, Marvell, Micron, Lam, KLA, Western Digital, Seagate, among many others. So what exists from the past 20 years for the US? Facebook, Zoom, Tesla, SpaceX, Workday, Twilio, DataDog, Cloudflare, Splunk, DocuSign, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Square, Coinbase, Stripe, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Roku, MongoDB, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Okta, The Trade Desk, Teladoc, Veeva Systems, Dropbox, DoorDash, Unity Software, Etsy, DraftKings, Palantir, Proofpoint, Zillow, Qualtrics, Roblox, Robinhood, HubSpot, Five9, Zendesk, Coupa Software, Sofi, AppLovin (and I've probably missed a few) Most of these companies have solid growth profiles and will be far larger in ten years than they are today. Beyond that are dozens of single digit billion dollar tech companies born in the past 20 years that will join that list. The EU should also be asking itself why Atlassian and Shopify didn't originate there instead of Australia and Canada. Why didn't UiPath move its HQ to Berlin or Paris instead of NY? Why didn't Elon Musk start SpaceX or Tesla in the EU? Why did the Collisons build Stripe in California? Why is the EU competition for AWS companies like Hetzner, OVH and Scaleway (which are actually DigitalOcean peers)? One may not like Bezos, however he's going to push tens of billions of dollars into attempting to build up Blue Origin, where's the EU comparable by one of their zillionaires? All the biggest US fortunes are first generation and in technology, except for Buffett. The biggest EU fortunes are in fashion, cosmetics, retail. That's representative of the EU being left behind, stagnant. The US badly beat Europe in the IBM-HP-Fairchild era. The US badly beat Europe in the Apple-Microsoft-Intel era. The US badly beat Europe in the early Internet & Web era (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia, Cisco). The US is badly beating Europe in the cloud era. And that's understating things. It's not a race. The EU isn't even participating, they're stretching on the sidelines, watching the US and China compete to see who can build the largest tech companies (China's tech companies are largely locked inside of China, and that's about to get worse, so the US will win that contest). There's no indication that the Europeans have figured out how to compete, how to scale quickly through their own markets and then rapidly push globally to win markets before the US companies do. So far all they've come up with is top down command schemes whereby countries like France think they can will an AWS competitor into existence magically, or alternatively they scheme to use regulatory capture to entirely avoid having to compete.
  - pyrale 5y ago
    The point you quoted was about the US tech producing several behemoths in the turn of the century. As of today, no later company in your list is on the path of competing with the best of that generation. You decided to read that point as an appeal to EU-US banter-if-not-chauvinism, I'm afraid that's not really a discussion I'm interested in having on HN.
  - talentedcoin 5y ago
    Thank you for putting it much better than I did. I am disappointed that the people in this thread are such big fans of bad regulation.
fogihujy 5y ago
The EU fell of that wagon long before GDPR. There weren't any major IT businesses from Europe 20 years ago either. If anything, GDPR might actually give European businesses some room to maneuver on the European market, as US businesses seems hell-bent on making money off their users' data rather than the core services they provide for the users.

There are many other reasons why large tech companies have a hard time emerging in Europe. One could argue that none of the really big tech companies that emerged in the US is recent either. So it makes sense, if companies can't be helped, for EU to at least try to protect the consumers.

adventured 5y ago
> One could argue that none of the really big tech companies that emerged in the US is recent either. That can't be reasonably argued. The US has dozens of large tech companies that have emerged more recently than the classic big tech giants. The EU, or Europe more broadly, has exceptionally few. More recently, for large tech companies, is the past ~20 years. It typically takes a long time to become worth $20 billion or $50b or $100b. That time frame excludes Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Adobe, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, Dell/Emc, Vmware, Salesforce, PayPal, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Verisign, Intuit, IBM, HP, Autodesk, eBay, Booking, Expedia, Cadence, Marvell, Micron, Lam, KLA, Western Digital, Seagate, among many others. So what exists from the past 20 years for the US? Facebook, Zoom, Tesla, SpaceX, Workday, Twilio, DataDog, Cloudflare, Splunk, DocuSign, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Square, Coinbase, Stripe, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Roku, MongoDB, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Okta, The Trade Desk, Teladoc, Veeva Systems, Dropbox, DoorDash, Unity Software, Etsy, DraftKings, Palantir, Proofpoint, Zillow, Qualtrics, Roblox, Robinhood, HubSpot, Five9, Zendesk, Coupa Software, Sofi, AppLovin (and I've probably missed a few) Most of these companies have solid growth profiles and will be far larger in ten years than they are today. Beyond that are dozens of single digit billion dollar tech companies born in the past 20 years that will join that list. The EU should also be asking itself why Atlassian and Shopify didn't originate there instead of Australia and Canada. Why didn't UiPath move its HQ to Berlin or Paris instead of NY? Why didn't Elon Musk start SpaceX or Tesla in the EU? Why did the Collisons build Stripe in California? Why is the EU competition for AWS companies like Hetzner, OVH and Scaleway (which are actually DigitalOcean peers)? One may not like Bezos, however he's going to push tens of billions of dollars into attempting to build up Blue Origin, where's the EU comparable by one of their zillionaires? All the biggest US fortunes are first generation and in technology, except for Buffett. The biggest EU fortunes are in fashion, cosmetics, retail. That's representative of the EU being left behind, stagnant. The US badly beat Europe in the IBM-HP-Fairchild era. The US badly beat Europe in the Apple-Microsoft-Intel era. The US badly beat Europe in the early Internet & Web era (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia, Cisco). The US is badly beating Europe in the cloud era. And that's understating things. It's not a race. The EU isn't even participating, they're stretching on the sidelines, watching the US and China compete to see who can build the largest tech companies (China's tech companies are largely locked inside of China, and that's about to get worse, so the US will win that contest). There's no indication that the Europeans have figured out how to compete, how to scale quickly through their own markets and then rapidly push globally to win markets before the US companies do. So far all they've come up with is top down command schemes whereby countries like France think they can will an AWS competitor into existence magically, or alternatively they scheme to use regulatory capture to entirely avoid having to compete.
- pyrale 5y ago
  The point you quoted was about the US tech producing several behemoths in the turn of the century. As of today, no later company in your list is on the path of competing with the best of that generation. You decided to read that point as an appeal to EU-US banter-if-not-chauvinism, I'm afraid that's not really a discussion I'm interested in having on HN.
- talentedcoin 5y ago
  Thank you for putting it much better than I did. I am disappointed that the people in this thread are such big fans of bad regulation.

fogihujy 5y ago

The EU fell of that wagon long before GDPR. There weren't any major IT businesses from Europe 20 years ago either. If anything, GDPR might actually give European businesses some room to maneuver on the European market, as US businesses seems hell-bent on making money off their users' data rather than the core services they provide for the users.