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Are there any internationally relevant internet companies in Europe? Spotify comes to mind. Then .. I can't think of anything. No search engine. No browser. No

by TekMol 4y ago

Are there any internationally relevant internet companies in Europe? Spotify comes to mind. Then .. I can't think of anything. No search engine. No browser. No operating system. No social network. No ecommerce company. No cloud computing platform. No financial services company. No transportation company. No travel company. No nothing. Except for a $20B music aggregator, there is not a single sector of the web where European companies managed to get a foot in the door. The whole fabric of the internet used in Europe and worldwide is made outside of Europe. But Europe seems to have learned nothing from suffocating their internet industry. Instead of wafting fresh air to the patient, governments just recently decided to give him the ultimate death pill: The GDPR. We can only wait and see with what bureaucratic monsters Europe will prevent the emergence of an AI industry.

sensanaty 4y ago
I guess mass, unchecked data harvesting is a "waft of fresh air" to yanks? Makes sense once you consider the usual target demographic of HN, which is the temporarily temporarily embarrassed millionaire type. Here's to hoping that the EU does indeed kill the cancer that is A"I" before it ruins the world with all of the "fresh" air it blows over the entire internet.
- ESMirro 4y ago
  Agreed. These threads always bring out the myopic xenophobes.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
Reading Franz Kafka there is at least one takeaway: bureaucracy is corruption. Having said this, the corruption of EU, bureaucratic or otherwise, in Bruxelles but also randomly from the French/German government to Slovenian or Romanian governments, puts the US with their legalized lobby to shame. There is a reason why PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, KPMG or Ernst & Young have headquarters in Europe, they want to learn from the masters [1]. Perhaps someone will write by the year 2500 a monograph with the title/subtitle: EU funding programmes—the downfall of Europe: how hundreds of billions were spent so that police officers, judges, customs officers, secret services officers, politicians and their friends and relatives used public funding to build holiday homes for the bed-and-breakfast "industry" and "start-ups" in the pretzel "industry" [2]. At least the trillions the DOD pumps into Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and their friends ensure the US military supremacy, the EU is supreme in publicly-funded pretzels and craft beer, manufactured with Chinese machinery. [1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/lux-leaks-confession-jean-claude-juncker-admits-he-made-major-mistake https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/lux-lea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_J%C3%A1n_Kuciak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_J%C3%A1n_Kuciak
Jataman606 4y ago
What regulations block Japan, Korea, Canada and other non-european countries from having this big ecosystem of internet companies?
- TekMol 4y ago
  Canada, albeit almost 20 times smaller than Europe has created a web company more than twice as big as the biggest European web company. Shopify. It has a market cap of over $50B. Korea has Samsung. A $300B giant. Albeit not a web company, I would consider their smartphones part of the internet ecosystem.
kingstoned 4y ago
Even Spotify is mostly owned by US investors and pays out most of the money to US music companies and recently to US podcasters. Unfortunately, Europe strongly embraces socialism [1] and is hostile to entrepreneurs. According to a study [2]: "Western Europe is shown to underperform in all four measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship relative to the U.S. Once we account for Europe’s strong performance in technological innovation, an “entrepreneurship deficit” relative to East Asia also becomes apparent. This underperformance is missed by most standard measures. Finally, we also find that China performs surprisingly well in Schumpeterian entrepreneurship, especially compared to Eastern Europe." [1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/02/23/british-people-view-socialism-more-favourably-capi https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/0... [2] https://www.ifn.se/media/2rvl3xy3/wp1170.pdf https://www.ifn.se/media/2rvl3xy3/wp1170.pdf
goodlinks 4y ago
Google has gotten worse since it was created.. chat gpt is the first thing since that even has a hint of value. Ornganisations with more focus on making money than social responsibility are not a net positive. So i struggle to see any innovation from outside of europe to balance your claim. Maybe windows, but linux was started in europe.. Shrug.
pxoe 4y ago
so, the fresh air is data harvesting and data exploitation. got it. completely tracks with american tech industry
rlupi 4y ago
It looks like you don't know much about Europe. Let's start with browser. Opera, made in Norway. Search Engine. Ecosia, Qwant. Social network: Mastodon. Operating system: are you kidding right? Linux, Linus Torvalds is from Finland. E-commerce company, just a few : Otto Group (bigger than uber, close in size to Baidu), Zalando, Booking.com, Digitec Galaxus (Swiss company, now selling in Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy; way better than Amazon). Cloud computing platform: Hetzner, OVHCloud, SAP Cloud. Financial services: Adyen (payment company, net income about 1/5th of paypal with 1/10th of the employees), Klarna, Revolut. Entertainment company: if you accept video games as entertainment, Wooga from Berlin made Diamond Dash, Ninja Theory UK (Heavenly Sword, Devil May Cry), GameLoft is in Paris (Assassin's Creed mobile), Rovio (Angry Birds), Team17 UK (Worms, I know a bit dated but it's a classic), Crytek Germany (Crysis, Far Cry, Homefront), Supercell Finland (Clash of Clans), CCP Games Iceland (EVE Online, EVE Valkyrie), Arkhane Studios France (Dishonored, Bioshock 2), King Sweden (Candy Crush), RockStar North (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne), CD Project Poland (The Witcher, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), DICE Sweden (Mirror's Edge, Battlefield), Hello Games UK (No Man's Sky). Since we are talking about AI. DeepMind started and is still mainly based in UK, although it is now part of Alphabet. DeepL, often better than Google translate. ASML, the single company in the world that makes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines necessary to manufacture all the AI chips and latest processors. ARM, based in Cambridge UK. In the same vein: NXP Semiconductors, STM Microelectronics, Infineon Technology (originally Siemens semiconductor manufacturing division). A few startups are doing good AI chips, e.g. Graphcore, GrAI Matter Labs. IoT protocols: LoRA, LoRAWAN. Open source: honorable mention to Redis, made by Salvatore Sanfilippo, fellow Italian like me. OpenTitan: the root of trust chip that powers Google security chips in everything from Pixel phones to datacenter hardware, is a collaboration with ETH Switzerland, lowRISC Cambridge, G+D Mobile Security Germany, and other international companies (https://opentitan.org/ https://opentitan.org/). A lot of industrial robot companies, which are essential to manufacture most stuff you buy on e-commerce sites, are from Europe: ABB (Switzerland) and KUKA (Germany) are the first and third companies worldwide by market for industrial robotics. Comau (Italy) is 5th. Stäubli (Switzerland) is 9th. Universal Robots (Denmark) is 10th. Notably, all the others in the top ten (Fanuc, Yaskawa, Epson, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi) are from Japan. None are from US.
- 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
You are limiting your investigation to consumer brands. Lots of codecs (which support video infrastructure) originate in Europe, look up Fraunhofer institute for example. Python, the world's most popular programming language, invented and managed by a European. The world wide web originates in Switzerland. So does Linux. A lot of the technology you use every day comes from Europe, it just isn't in the form of a consumer product.
- morpheuskafka 4y ago
  OP was asking about companies, not technologies. They weren't making the claim that say, academic research in codecs would be any worse off in the EU than elsewhere. The fact that Europe is good at inventing underlying technologies isn't necessarily a counterargument to their claim. There are other internet/SaaS companies that are not consumer brands (ex. Cloudflare, Salesforce, etc.). But what you listed are not companies at all (other than some kind of small "company" that exists to support development resources for the project).
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    And I'm saying that that's a foolishly narrow focus to determine who should get to shape internet policy.
    - px43 4y ago
      I think it's less about who can shape internet policy, and more of a rebuke on how technophobic regulation has led to Europe completely missing out on a key global industry despite many key innovations originating in Europe.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        Europeans love technology, but they also love other things, like privacy and equitable outcomes. There is plenty of computer industry in Europe, it is just not as focused on consumer brands.
lillecarl 4y ago
There are heaps, they're just not as big. We don't celebrate monopolies the same way you do, we don't celebrate exploiting people either.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I get it. It was an identity damaging question that was asked so it feels validating to use an identity reinforcing answer claiming that Europeans don't like monopolies etc etc However, it is curiously exactly the opposite. Europe suffers from massive regulatory capture and very few breakout disruptive companies to challenge that status quo. The classic example in the dotcom 2 era is Deutsch Telekom and their approach to laundering prices through a totally captured regulator. Of course Alstom-Siemens et al. will claim that there is no anticompetitiveness to the whole thing. But I think the truth is plain to see. Personally, I think it's the same thing as always. It's always not the masters of the present who will be the innovators of the future. It's referred to sort of in the Innovators Dilemma, but not quite. The empires of the ancient world, Chinese and Indian, did not have the Industrial Revolution. The empires of the old world did not have the Silicon Revolution. Each is too busy protecting the agents of the status quo simply because they cannot risk throwing away their present greatness for future greatness. Almost no human beings can. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg alone can.
- astrange 4y ago
  Europe has more monopolies; governments like monopolies because they're easier to regulate. A lot of small companies means there's too many to keep an eye on.
jonnybgood 4y ago
The EU shoots themselves in the foot with their regulation. Take a look at the EU response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. The EU enacted similar legislation by regulating green technologies in to existence. The IRA instead incentivized green technologies in to existence. EU green tech companies and investments were going to leave the EU. This caused EU heads of state to lobby the US president directly to change the legislation.[1] You would think they would have changed their own legislation to make it competitive, but instead the EU wanted to change ours. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-joe-biden-us-france-lands-unexpected-concession-on-inflation-reduction-act/ https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-joe-biden-us...

by TekMol 4y ago

sensanaty 4y ago

I guess mass, unchecked data harvesting is a "waft of fresh air" to yanks? Makes sense once you consider the usual target demographic of HN, which is the temporarily temporarily embarrassed millionaire type. Here's to hoping that the EU does indeed kill the cancer that is A"I" before it ruins the world with all of the "fresh" air it blows over the entire internet.

ESMirro 4y ago
Agreed. These threads always bring out the myopic xenophobes.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

Reading Franz Kafka there is at least one takeaway: bureaucracy is corruption. Having said this, the corruption of EU, bureaucratic or otherwise, in Bruxelles but also randomly from the French/German government to Slovenian or Romanian governments, puts the US with their legalized lobby to shame. There is a reason why PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, KPMG or Ernst & Young have headquarters in Europe, they want to learn from the masters [1]. Perhaps someone will write by the year 2500 a monograph with the title/subtitle: EU funding programmes—the downfall of Europe: how hundreds of billions were spent so that police officers, judges, customs officers, secret services officers, politicians and their friends and relatives used public funding to build holiday homes for the bed-and-breakfast "industry" and "start-ups" in the pretzel "industry" [2]. At least the trillions the DOD pumps into Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and their friends ensure the US military supremacy, the EU is supreme in publicly-funded pretzels and craft beer, manufactured with Chinese machinery. [1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/lux-leaks-confession-jean-claude-juncker-admits-he-made-major-mistake https://www.icij.org/investigations/luxembourg-leaks/lux-lea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_J%C3%A1n_Kuciak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_J%C3%A1n_Kuciak

Jataman606 4y ago

What regulations block Japan, Korea, Canada and other non-european countries from having this big ecosystem of internet companies?

TekMol 4y ago
Canada, albeit almost 20 times smaller than Europe has created a web company more than twice as big as the biggest European web company. Shopify. It has a market cap of over $50B. Korea has Samsung. A $300B giant. Albeit not a web company, I would consider their smartphones part of the internet ecosystem.

kingstoned 4y ago

Even Spotify is mostly owned by US investors and pays out most of the money to US music companies and recently to US podcasters. Unfortunately, Europe strongly embraces socialism [1] and is hostile to entrepreneurs. According to a study [2]: "Western Europe is shown to underperform in all four measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship relative to the U.S. Once we account for Europe’s strong performance in technological innovation, an “entrepreneurship deficit” relative to East Asia also becomes apparent. This underperformance is missed by most standard measures. Finally, we also find that China performs surprisingly well in Schumpeterian entrepreneurship, especially compared to Eastern Europe." [1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/02/23/british-people-view-socialism-more-favourably-capi https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/0... [2] https://www.ifn.se/media/2rvl3xy3/wp1170.pdf https://www.ifn.se/media/2rvl3xy3/wp1170.pdf

goodlinks 4y ago

Google has gotten worse since it was created.. chat gpt is the first thing since that even has a hint of value. Ornganisations with more focus on making money than social responsibility are not a net positive. So i struggle to see any innovation from outside of europe to balance your claim. Maybe windows, but linux was started in europe.. Shrug.

pxoe 4y ago

so, the fresh air is data harvesting and data exploitation. got it. completely tracks with american tech industry

rlupi 4y ago

It looks like you don't know much about Europe. Let's start with browser. Opera, made in Norway. Search Engine. Ecosia, Qwant. Social network: Mastodon. Operating system: are you kidding right? Linux, Linus Torvalds is from Finland. E-commerce company, just a few : Otto Group (bigger than uber, close in size to Baidu), Zalando, Booking.com, Digitec Galaxus (Swiss company, now selling in Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy; way better than Amazon). Cloud computing platform: Hetzner, OVHCloud, SAP Cloud. Financial services: Adyen (payment company, net income about 1/5th of paypal with 1/10th of the employees), Klarna, Revolut. Entertainment company: if you accept video games as entertainment, Wooga from Berlin made Diamond Dash, Ninja Theory UK (Heavenly Sword, Devil May Cry), GameLoft is in Paris (Assassin's Creed mobile), Rovio (Angry Birds), Team17 UK (Worms, I know a bit dated but it's a classic), Crytek Germany (Crysis, Far Cry, Homefront), Supercell Finland (Clash of Clans), CCP Games Iceland (EVE Online, EVE Valkyrie), Arkhane Studios France (Dishonored, Bioshock 2), King Sweden (Candy Crush), RockStar North (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne), CD Project Poland (The Witcher, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), DICE Sweden (Mirror's Edge, Battlefield), Hello Games UK (No Man's Sky). Since we are talking about AI. DeepMind started and is still mainly based in UK, although it is now part of Alphabet. DeepL, often better than Google translate. ASML, the single company in the world that makes extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines necessary to manufacture all the AI chips and latest processors. ARM, based in Cambridge UK. In the same vein: NXP Semiconductors, STM Microelectronics, Infineon Technology (originally Siemens semiconductor manufacturing division). A few startups are doing good AI chips, e.g. Graphcore, GrAI Matter Labs. IoT protocols: LoRA, LoRAWAN. Open source: honorable mention to Redis, made by Salvatore Sanfilippo, fellow Italian like me. OpenTitan: the root of trust chip that powers Google security chips in everything from Pixel phones to datacenter hardware, is a collaboration with ETH Switzerland, lowRISC Cambridge, G+D Mobile Security Germany, and other international companies (https://opentitan.org/ https://opentitan.org/). A lot of industrial robot companies, which are essential to manufacture most stuff you buy on e-commerce sites, are from Europe: ABB (Switzerland) and KUKA (Germany) are the first and third companies worldwide by market for industrial robotics. Comau (Italy) is 5th. Stäubli (Switzerland) is 9th. Universal Robots (Denmark) is 10th. Notably, all the others in the top ten (Fanuc, Yaskawa, Epson, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi) are from Japan. None are from US.

4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

You are limiting your investigation to consumer brands. Lots of codecs (which support video infrastructure) originate in Europe, look up Fraunhofer institute for example. Python, the world's most popular programming language, invented and managed by a European. The world wide web originates in Switzerland. So does Linux. A lot of the technology you use every day comes from Europe, it just isn't in the form of a consumer product.

morpheuskafka 4y ago
OP was asking about companies, not technologies. They weren't making the claim that say, academic research in codecs would be any worse off in the EU than elsewhere. The fact that Europe is good at inventing underlying technologies isn't necessarily a counterargument to their claim. There are other internet/SaaS companies that are not consumer brands (ex. Cloudflare, Salesforce, etc.). But what you listed are not companies at all (other than some kind of small "company" that exists to support development resources for the project).
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  And I'm saying that that's a foolishly narrow focus to determine who should get to shape internet policy.
  - px43 4y ago
    I think it's less about who can shape internet policy, and more of a rebuke on how technophobic regulation has led to Europe completely missing out on a key global industry despite many key innovations originating in Europe.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Europeans love technology, but they also love other things, like privacy and equitable outcomes. There is plenty of computer industry in Europe, it is just not as focused on consumer brands.

lillecarl 4y ago

There are heaps, they're just not as big. We don't celebrate monopolies the same way you do, we don't celebrate exploiting people either.

renewiltord 4y ago
I get it. It was an identity damaging question that was asked so it feels validating to use an identity reinforcing answer claiming that Europeans don't like monopolies etc etc However, it is curiously exactly the opposite. Europe suffers from massive regulatory capture and very few breakout disruptive companies to challenge that status quo. The classic example in the dotcom 2 era is Deutsch Telekom and their approach to laundering prices through a totally captured regulator. Of course Alstom-Siemens et al. will claim that there is no anticompetitiveness to the whole thing. But I think the truth is plain to see. Personally, I think it's the same thing as always. It's always not the masters of the present who will be the innovators of the future. It's referred to sort of in the Innovators Dilemma, but not quite. The empires of the ancient world, Chinese and Indian, did not have the Industrial Revolution. The empires of the old world did not have the Silicon Revolution. Each is too busy protecting the agents of the status quo simply because they cannot risk throwing away their present greatness for future greatness. Almost no human beings can. Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg alone can.
astrange 4y ago
Europe has more monopolies; governments like monopolies because they're easier to regulate. A lot of small companies means there's too many to keep an eye on.

jonnybgood 4y ago

The EU shoots themselves in the foot with their regulation. Take a look at the EU response to the US Inflation Reduction Act. The EU enacted similar legislation by regulating green technologies in to existence. The IRA instead incentivized green technologies in to existence. EU green tech companies and investments were going to leave the EU. This caused EU heads of state to lobby the US president directly to change the legislation.[1] You would think they would have changed their own legislation to make it competitive, but instead the EU wanted to change ours. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-joe-biden-us-france-lands-unexpected-concession-on-inflation-reduction-act/ https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-joe-biden-us...