10 ms·

As someone living in Europe, I don't know if I should laugh or cry. The upside: From an investing perspective, the more regulations the EU comes up with, the m

• tremon 3y ago
  why every single European citizen is dependent on US hardware, US software and US services Mostly because US companies keep buying their EU competitors. Nokia, Skype, Spotify, ARM, ASML and countless others all originated in Europe. The ones that remain European are the ones that cannot be bought so easily, like Matrix (UK) or Mastodon (DE).
  • golemotron 3y ago
    That makes the original point. They are bought by US companies because the US has facilitated tech and capital growth. In another world, the EU would've done better on that and bought US companies.
    • conaclos 3y ago
      We certainly need more regulation to prevent this kind of buying. But that is clearly not the mood at the moment.
    • uxp8u61q 3y ago
      Is capital growth the most important goal we should set for ourselves as a society?
      • tiahura 3y ago
        An increase in productive capacity seems like a positive to me.
        • golemotron 3y ago
          Yes. That would've served Europe better too. Now they are in the embarrassing position of trying to regulate companies that aren't under their jurisdiction.
        • zlg_codes 3y ago
          There are reasons to live that don't include being exploited for profit.
          • ffgjgf1 3y ago
            So you’d rather be more poor and less productive (but still exploited) just so that corporations would have lower profits?
            • zlg_codes 3y ago
              I'd rather not be chained to serving humans at all, thanks.
              • ffgjgf1 3y ago
                Are you a robot?
      • refurb 3y ago
        The EU taxes profits, and economic growth results in increased employment and the tax revenue from taxing wages. This contributes to tax revenue and hence things like healthcare, social welfare, etc. I don't necessarily agree with Singapore's approach, but Lee Kwan Yew made a speech that sums it up nicely... "The opposition [in Parliament] say we're obsess with profit. I said 'Of course! That's how Singapore survives!' What do you think pays for all this? [talking about public housing, healthcare, public education, etc] You make profit into a dirty word and Singapore dies."
    • Slartie 3y ago
      None of these companies except Nokia and Skype were even bought out by US companies. And those two are not exactly huge losses for Europe. The entire comment is BS. The US doesn't have that much of a lead when it comes to hardware, especially chips, and is as dependent on Europe as Europe is dependent on the US in turn. Both are dependent on Taiwan anyways. The US has a lead on software, mostly due to an inherent advantage of having a large domestic market with mostly the same rules everywhere, whereas the European market is as big in total, but unfortunately is divided into many smaller markets with fairly large differences and cannot be captured as quickly as the US market. This gives companies which scale nearly effortlessly from a tech perspective (modern software based startups) a huge advantage in terms of the available headroom for quick, initial growth. This advantage is largely irrelevant in industries where physical stuff must be produced and which are therefore hard to scale anyway, but it is almost a guarantee for a dominant role in the realm of SAAS. So, no - there is no other world where Europe would have bought out US companies, at least not if we talk about Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc., and if we talk about a similarly-structured US and EU.
  • lackbeard 3y ago
    Isn't ASML a Dutch company? I can't seem to find any evidence they've ever been sold.
    • tacticalturtle 3y ago
      Neither Spotify, Arm, or ASML have been bought by US companies. This is easily shown by their Wikipedia pages.
      • JonChesterfield 3y ago
        Arm being the one that's currently listed on the nasdaq exchange and otherwise owned by softbank isn't a totally compelling example of a European company
        • throwaway5959 3y ago
          Just because it lists in the US doesn’t mean it’s a US company.
        • Slartie 3y ago
          It is also not a US company. Where it's listed doesn't matter much. It matters where a) headquarters and other significant physical presences are located and b) where the majority shareholders reside. In that regard it is largely a European, and partially a Japanese company.
  • dgellow 3y ago
    You may want to review your info, these companies haven’t been bought out by US corporations edit: I mean other than Nokia and Skype of course
    • Yujf 3y ago
      Nokia hasnt even been bought by US companies. It sold a branch that was unsuccesfull and after it was bought it was still not successfull and they have the rights back. People are just ignorant about so many things and claim it is EU regulations that are the problem but that is a very simplistic view that just goes to show they are not interested in actually looking into what is going on and why
  • s3p 3y ago
    Ah yes I forgot how dependent the world is on checks notes Skype and Nokia
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      Do you know what Nokia does as a company nowadays? You might be surprised when you find out.
      • gitaarik 3y ago
        Surprise us
        • carlosjobim 3y ago
          They are on the infrastructure side of cellular networks now, they are not irrelevant just because they're not seen by the consumer. And the Nokia rubber boot factory is still doing well, after splitting from the main company in 1990.
    • nine_k 3y ago
      Nokia is a key player of backbone communication tech. Before the advent of iPhone and Android, Nokia was a really heavyweight player in mobile devices space. But nobody is guaranteed their place if they make a strategic mistake. Ask GMC, Chrysler, Ford, etc why, when I'm going down a street, I see that more than half of the cars are Japanese.
• tudorw 3y ago
  We got BAE Systems and QinetiQ so...
  • rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    Neither is EU.
    • tudorw 3y ago
      UK, not EU but then the OP mentioned European Citizens, I'd argue I'm still European, that's geography.
• elteto 3y ago
  > Is nobody in the EU bringing up the question why every single European citizen is dependent on US hardware, US software and US services? And even more concerning is the dependence on US aid and weapons for Ukraine. How Europe doesn’t see Ukraine’s invasion as an existential threat is beyond me.
  • api 3y ago
    If isolationists like Trump come to power in the US and do things like pull out of NATO, Europe might be suddenly in serious trouble. This is not a far fetched possibility. Even if Trump loses or isn’t even on the ticket, an increasing number of younger Americans are opposed to overseas involvements including some on the left side of the spectrum. Ballooning US national debt interest and social security issues could force the US to make steep cuts in places like military and overseas aid.
    • Jerrrry 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • simion314 3y ago
      You need to remind those americans that Europe buys a lot of military crap from USA, pulling from NATO might cost USA more, and frankly Europe had a lot to pay from USA operations around the world by sending peace keeprs there or by having to handle the refuges. I would be that pulling from NATO will not make those military money be moved into healthcare, I heard this story with Brexit.
      • FredPret 3y ago
        European nations might buy a lot of hardware from the States, but the US also maintains a large and very expensive military presence there, and everywhere. So if military relations cool down, the US pulls out of Europe, and Europe exclusively buys its own arms, it might actually save the US money. But that seems a little far-fetched. There's a lot of transatlantic banter on the internet but when the chips are down, the West will likely pull together yet again.
• JonChesterfield 3y ago
  The EU doesn't aspire to economic or commercial success. It's an ideologically motivated socialist state with no real ideas for how to fund a high quality of life for the majority, but that's OK because the stated objective is equal quality of life, not high quality of life. Except for the few people on the top of the hierarchy, they warrant maximum quality of life as is traditional in such power structures.
  • robswc 3y ago
    This is the vibe I got. For better or worse, it seems people in Europe enjoy/pursue equality more than individual success. I know many people that move to the US to "escape" that system though and they've been quite successful.
  • kranke155 3y ago
    The EU isn’t a state at all. Getting tired of usually Americans talking about the EU as some kind of superstate. It’s nothing of the sort.
    • JonChesterfield 3y ago
      This is a European using terminology likely to resonate with the American readership. It's a government that spans and partially controls multiple countries. The analogy to the US government that spans and partially controls multiple states should be readily apparent.
      • kranke155 3y ago
        You're using nonsense language to make an ideological point. You're blurring things out instead of clarifying them. There is not such thing as an EU "state", period.
  • bugglebeetle 3y ago
    The EU is not in anyway socialist. It’s a neoliberal Capitalist federation, explicitly so in all its founding documents and philosophy.
• kmeisthax 3y ago
  You didn't actually read the announcement. The EU is only regulating "high risk" uses of AI - i.e. facial recognition as used by law enforcement. Your spicy autocomplete and image generators should be safe. Also, the EU didn't "miss the Internet", it got muscled out of the Internet by American tech monopolies.
  • chatmasta 3y ago
    > the EU didn't "miss the Internet", it got muscled out of the Internet by American tech monopolies This sounds like a distinction without a difference. The American tech monopolies only became monopolies because of their first mover advantage. The EU had no Internet companies with first mover advantage... in other words, they missed the Internet.
    • kmeisthax 3y ago
      Monopoly building is not a function of first-mover advantage. In fact, being the first mover is usually a disadvantage, because you have to figure out how your business model is going to work. Late movers can just copy it but better. Going down the list of US tech companies: Google did not have first-mover advantage. They were actually very late in search. They won search by having a superior algorithm and, more importantly, enough business discipline to not deliberately ruin it. More importantly, with the exception of Gmail, every other successful arm of Google has been a startup that they bought and scaled up. In some cases, notably YouTube, they were even competing with the company they'd later buy because they couldn't build the business themselves. Apple did technically have first-mover advantage, given that they've been around in personal computing since the late 70s, but they blew it so hard they nearly went bankrupt. The Apple we know about today was destroyed and rebuilt by NeXT and Steve Jobs buying Apple with Apple's money. Even then, a good chunk of their success has been due to their purchase of several chip and core design firms that give the iPhone an edge that competing phone manufacturers can't buy. Even the first iPod was designed by someone else and bought by Apple. Microsoft... also wasn't a first-mover. OK, they were there at the start of PCs selling BASIC interpreters, but the IBM PC DOS you probably are thinking of as their "first OS" was SCP[0] QDOS, which they bought and customized for late-moving IBM. The same story goes for the Internet - they saw Netscape Navigator, got scared, bought NCSA Mosaic, rebranded it to Internet Explorer, added a bunch of nonstandard extensions, and integrated it deeply into Windows to kill Netscape dead. Is there a pattern here? Yes - that monopolies form because companies can buy instead of build. Why this happened in the US and not the EU is simple: the US stopped enforcing its antitrust laws and gave tech companies a regulatory pass in the name of the "future". This is not the EU missing the Internet, this is the EU being the victim of cheating. [0] Seattle Computer Products, which I'm assured is not a front of the SCP Foundation
• quadcore 3y ago
  Absolutely. I think we are not going to see the end of that inflation anytime soon because of that. We have nothing to put in front of Google, Apple, Microsoft. Nothing. The issue though is we need to federate. We are not Europe yet really but a bunch of small countries. The political setup is not there for big tech companies to thrives.
  • chaseha 3y ago
    federated but united... we kinda already are, no? see all the state level privacy laws
• mike_hock 3y ago
  > US hardware Chinese hardware.
• raverbashing 3y ago
  > Europe missed the internet What the EU doesn't have is large scale social networks, and large scale "infrastructure" companies (the likes of Google and AWS) but it is missing less than what your average US perspective sees. No wonder most US companies sell a lot to Europe (including B2B). > is dependent on US hardware, US software and US services True. And the US (and the rest of the world) is dependent on HW produced on TSMC and assembled in China. It truly sucks
  • aenis 3y ago
    Which in turn relies on litography equipment made in the EU and Japan.
• charles_f 3y ago
  Disregarding the regulation itself - the logic you describe here is that non-EU competition isn't regulated, so EU shouldn't regulate anything to be competitive. 1- the EU didn't "miss the internet" because of regulatory policies. At least not regulations on the Internet. 2- even if that was the case, does it mean the EU should always level itself by the worst competitors? 3- and then, assuming it deregulated LLM, how would would it lead to a place where EU would suddenly becomes competitive on that market?
  • adastra22 3y ago
    It missed the internet in the sense that it is near impossible to create an innovative (read: disruptive) internet company within the context of EU and member state regulations. So people don’t bother and entrepreneurs emigrate to the USA. It looks like the EU is preparing to miss AI as well.
    • bawolff 3y ago
      There are a lot of other countries that are not EU which also have minimal big internet companies. Did all of them regulate badly too? I suspect its more the power of consolidation and first mover advantage.
      • Guillaume86 3y ago
        And having a common language across the market.
    • layer8 3y ago
      I could honestly do with less disruption by internet companies.
    • svetb 3y ago
      Europe “missed the Internet” (and the US didn’t) because of various underlying factors - smaller/more fragmented markets, a more muted entrepreneurial culture, shallower pools of capital, etc. I don’t think the fact that Google, Amazon, and Facebook were built in the US is down to EU regulations. It’s no more difficult to start a tech company in Europe than it is in the US, and it’s generally no more onerous to grow it, from a regulatory perspective. But ambitious entrepreneurs often head to the US in order to tap into a larger market and more developed ecosystem. So I’m not sure the analogy is that valid. But yeah, I do think that EU regulation of AI may be an additional factor that skews the playing field.
• tsimionescu 3y ago
  The opposite is actually true, most likely the lack of regulation is why we don't have more European hardware and software. Look at Russia and China - they have much more onerous regulation, and have large popular local services (VKontakte, WeeChat). I'm not suggesting in any way we should want to be like China and Russia, but I think they prove that regulation doesn't prevent local business springing up to compete with international behemoths.
  • snordgren 3y ago
    Those countries simply forbid competitors from selling in their domestic markets. EU regulations apply equally to EU and non-EU companies, so they won’t lead to homegrown tech champions. More likely they will cement the dominance of US tech giants because they’re the ones who have the resources to follow these regulations.
    • tsimionescu 3y ago
      Facebook was available in Russia up until the invasion of Ukraine. China doesn't directly block most such companies either, it imposes censorship and technology control requirements. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon operate in China, with Chinese subsidiaries, but they are nowhere near as dominant as they are in the rest of the world.
    • usrnm 3y ago
      Not exactly true, up until 2022 Google, Meta and others operated in Russia and were competing with Yandex and VK on a more or less even playing field
  • 0xDEF 3y ago
    >popular local services >Vkontakte, WeeChat Since 2008 big US tech companies have been a runaway GDP doubling success. It is laughable to compare them with VK and WeChat. The reason we Europeans should aim to have our own big tech companies is because we are currently missing out on the greatest wealth generation in history.
    • 3y ago
• seydor 3y ago
  I think you misunderstand how EU works. In reality it s a social club where mediocre politicians become careerists and climb the social ladder with a practically unlimitd budget of german money. There is no dialogue with any society other than with the brussels bubble and sometimes european academia. Some ambitious people latch onto the popular matters in the media like privacy, AI, climate, blockchain etc, and naturally they want to become a part of it by creating ... rules. There was a time decades ago when EU seemed to have some cohesion, nowadays it s just ambitious individuals who want power for a few years and then go on with their lives to other endeavors. It's almost all process and a lot of marketing-speak these days. Really a lot of marketing-speak , that sounds frighteningly more and more like the ESG and DEI departments of corporates. It s become soulless
• 5kyn3t 3y ago
  I often ask myself that too. The talent and infrastructure definitely exist in Europe. (until the people leave for the US) Is it the big VC money, or some magical governmental support (military-industrial complex)? is it the english language that gives the US-companies an advantage? is it the different mindset? I really do not know. It's very weird and also sad and a bit frustrating to see that the market is in favor of one country that seems to get everything. I'm still crying for Nokia.
  • RivieraKid 3y ago
    Yep, I've been wondering this too. It could be: - America has a large unified market, it's easier to expand than in the EU. - Immigration, smart and ambitious people move to America so their companies have access to better pool of talent. Better labor mobility compared to the EU also helps. - Cultural differences related to entrepreneurship and work. - Europeans who have historically moved to America have specific genetics and learned behavior, which is passed over generations. Maybe they're less risk-averse, more optimistic or have more energy and desire to do something. Basically, if you select a subpopulation which is willing to move to a different country hoping for a better life, this subpopulation will have distinct traits. - Legislation, taxes? Europe should first identify this as a problem and then try hard to understand and solve it.
• brap 3y ago
  I remember not long ago during the large tech layoffs, people in France and Germany were proud that the regulations meant they couldn’t be laid off, and looked down at other primitive countries without such regulations. I wonder how attractive it is for Google/Microsoft/etc to start new teams and hire engineers in those countries. Probably not so much because of the risk. I also wonder how these regulations affect salaries. For the same cost I would much rather hire an equally talented US engineer and avoid regulations holding me down. Therefore EU engineers must be cheaper to hire. Maybe EU citizens want to trade things like job security for fewer jobs and lower wages, but I feel like people mostly imagine regulation is consequence-free.
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    The difference in salaries is sooooo vast that it make sense. A new grad at AWS makes about 45k gross in Poland, 55k in Germany. That’s about 1/3 what a junior makes in the US. 90-110k for L5 in Germany, 80k in Poland, and 250k-300k in US. It’s a no brainer all things considered.
• csydas 3y ago
  how do yoh mean europe missed the internet? my experience since i left the us years ago is that the tech used in eu is leagues above that from us companies and often feature equivalent or even better. banking and payments are a fine example of this as instant transfers were built into the banking system as i get it for some time and every bank i’ve used has had instant transfers by phone, card, or iban for years. even when i was in russia it was pretty common for pop up shops on the street to accept either cash or direct payments via a phone number they posted. even quite a few shops used this model. i would not call the tech for common US life particularly good or something that is desirable to emulate. i thjnk europe is doing pretty well wrt the internet. it’s no coincidence for me that EU sites usually follow gdpr as its written and supposed to be and include a clear “deny all” button typically whereas many us and uk sites i try to read have pages of obtuse buttons and menus to manually deselect dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tracking “features” on their sites. (not 100% every site ofc but it’s my general experience) i am not worried about being late to the party with ai either as the current offerings from the big players either are neutered to a pretty high amount or the companies are unabashed regarding their intent to serve more fuckjng ads via ai. i’ll gladly pass on that until we see a better alternative as the benefit for me from ai is minimal, and at best so far for my line of work ai just adds noise to already noisy conversations and more things to research and verify/fix than it does help. i cannot see that the current ai hype is at a good and useful stage where i want to pay for it for daily use. it’s great and interesting tech for sure but it’s not worth it for me yet. that the ai based game where the goal is to trick the ai to give you passwords has been the most useful ai project i’ve used speaks a lot to me, as the “bad” and unexpected results are part of the challenge and fun of the game.
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  as pointed out by others, this is a myopic view. as much as "AI" has been overhyped, most of the regulations do not prevent the advancements in the field. doing it right seems better than the startup grindset of experimenting and failing fast imho. if you look away from consumer (and generic-use business) space, a lot of software and hardware has local players. to think you can do the whole stack inside europe is a pipe dream, however. even if you go wild west on the regulations.