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>If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market..

• arcanemachiner 2y ago
  Off the top of my head as a non-European: GDPR, 2-year warranties and other consumer protection laws
  • lawlessone 2y ago
    :-)
  • nkrisc 2y ago
    Oh, those pesky consumers getting in the way of the innovation of the free market with their protections. If only they could be fully exploited for maximum value extraction without interference.
    • stavros 2y ago
      That's exactly what I think when I read one of these "EU stifles innovation" comments. It sounds to me like the equivalent of not wanting socialized healthcare because "the poors" might get it, not caring about the fact that you're the one who will benefit. This is the "everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire" of consumer rights. Everyone in the US is a temporarily embarrassed capitalist overlord.
      • newfriend 2y ago
        This is a strawman. "Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it". Also the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is another strawman, used by those who dislike capitalism. People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them.
        • stavros 2y ago
          > "Rich" people don't want socialized healthcare because of perceived or real disadvantages of that system. Not because "the poors might get it". That's fair, I should have said "because the poors might benefit". Rich people don't like socialized healthcare because they, by definition, will pay for people who can't afford it. The problem is when people who will benefit from this identify with people who will lose from it. > People can and do support a variety of causes and policies without they themselves benefitting from them. They do, but here we're talking about the opposite: People being against policies they benefit from, because they identify with the group that will not. P.S. I liked your comment, it was a reasoned reply that furthers the debate, thank you.
          • EgregiousCube 2y ago
            You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way. The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are: First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and; Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in general hard to get excited about tax increases. The financial concern is in the taking, not in the getting.
            • danaris 2y ago
              > You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way. I'm afraid your experiences are not universal. There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is due to their level of deserving (Just World Fallacy), it's very easy to extend that to "and therefore we shouldn't try to help poor people; they're just being punished for being bad people."
              • EgregiousCube 2y ago
      • danem 2y ago
        The resistance to socialized healthcare in America can be easily understood without resorting to bizarre strawmen about hating poor people. Healthcare is of course a huge part of our economy and lives. Many (most?) people are satisfied with the status quo and are hesitant to see (what they consider to be) a huge increase in government power, spending, and general involvement in their lives. It's the same impulse that motivates people to oppose new housing -- people are loss averse and hate change.
        • stavros 2y ago
          Will it be a huge increase in spending? Isn't it estimated to reduce costs by a lot?
          • antisthenes 2y ago
            Yes, the resistance is because the private sector will lose a lot of (parasitic) jobs. It's a non-starter to attempt to reduce health insurance companies power, because it would gut their employee numbers. It's an unsavory thought, but the US has a significant amount of people employed in the business of denying healthcare to other people, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of jobs. Any politician attempting to fix this would be committing political suicide.
          • rockemsockem 2y ago
            I think they mean it's an increase in government spending, which would of course be true even if overall healthcare overhead spending is reduced.
          • moduspol 2y ago
            We do not have an established history of accurately predicting or managing the costs of overwhelmingly expensive government programs, at least here in the US.
            • marcinzm 2y ago
              The US already runs two government healthcare programs. There are 65 million people in Medicare and 83 million in Medicaid. For less money per patient than private insurance.
    • wyager 2y ago
      This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.
      • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        People die from inability to afford something as fundamental as healthcare in the US. You are poorer than any European ever could be.
        • wyager 2y ago
          > You are poorer than any European ever could be Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example. Most Americans grumble about paying for healthcare, and we are getting ripped off, but it's also very rare for someone to actually die because they can't afford it. Anyone in the top, say, 80% of American society has some form of employer-subsidized insurance.
          • troupo 2y ago
            > some form These words are doing some very heavy lifting.
          • csomar 2y ago
            > The median person in the poorest US state is richer than the median person in the UK, for example. This is due to the garbage GDP numbers. Based on these, the quality of life in the Mississippi is better than in Japan. Not a single chance. The US numbers are highly inflated by the financial sector and real estate. It'll take a financial crisis and dethroning of US dollar to show how truly poor these places are.
            • wyager 2y ago
              There are multiple reasons that Japan is better than Mississippi, but "Japan is actually materially wealthier" is not one of them.
  • andy_ppp 2y ago
    GDPR is really sensible legislation that largely only applies to companies who should be treating your personal data as sensitive data. I built a GDPR complaint system and was really happy about the security we put in place that we definitely wouldn’t have thought to do without these laws. Things like having someone you can ask and request personal data from at big companies is also an extremely well thought through idea. I don’t understand the issues people have with it to be honest…
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      Most people have no problem with the GDPR. It only seems otherwise on this forum and similar echo chambers / bubbles where lots of people made their fortunes with adtech.
      • ajford 2y ago
        I love the intention of the law, but it's so... flexible... in implementation that shitty implementers ended up making the browsing experience horrible with intrusive pop-ups and geo blocking. On mobile every page load ends up with me spending the first minute or so on page dealing with the half-screen "don't sell my info" cookie dance, followed with the ad-block pop-ups.
        • troupo 2y ago
          > but it's so... flexible... in implementation It usually isn't the law's job to dictate an implementation. > shitty implementers ended up making the browsing experience horrible with intrusive pop-ups and geo blocking. How is the law that doesn't even talk about browsers or cookies responsible for this?
      • flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
        My only complaint with GDPR is when I have to do boring work in the name of GDPR compliance :) But it's also driven some pretty interesting projects, so I'd probably call it a wash or perhaps a slight positive, even if I were to ignore the major benefits as a consumer
  • glitchcrab 2y ago
    What an utterly ridiculous response. In your eyes, businesses should be able to run roughshod over the consumer? Yes, maybe the laws could have been more polished or have been implemented in a better way, but the underlying idea of protecting the consumer is the important takeaway from these laws.
    • lawlessone 2y ago
      >What an utterly ridiculous response. To be fair to them, i think it was sarcasm.
      • glitchcrab 2y ago
        You may well be right, or at least I hope you are anyway.
      • cratermoon 2y ago
        Poe's Law applies
      • ok_dad 2y ago
        On HN, you can be sure there are several people who literally believe the world would be better without any regulations or laws forcing businesses to do anything. This place is the pinnacle of anarcho-capitalism.
        • permo-w 2y ago
          at least here there's a spectrum of views that largely get by peacefully, and the entire place isn't focused on that conflict, a la twitter. yes there are lot of right-wing headcases entirely taken up by their own bottom-line, and yes the place itself is broadly funded and owned by people who think like, or at the very least, act like anarcho-capitalists, but they only really float to the surface when a post about regulation comes up, and even then, the discussion stays mostly civil. it could be a lot worse
          • shiroiushi 2y ago
  • atif089 2y ago
    Lol, as a European, thank god that people like you don't make our laws here
• henvic 2y ago
  I'm not talking about drone legislation here in Europe, but state overreach in tech in general + bad scene for startups compared to the US (for now...) due to politics.
  • chme 2y ago
    Any concrete examples you are referring to?
    • SSLy 2y ago
      The bi annual push for chat control (key „escrow”)
      • chme 2y ago
        Granted the chat control issue, is unfortunate on the privacy front, however I wouldn't call it a hindrance on innovation. IMO, often innovation happens because it is motivated to work around rules and regulations. So in many cases regulation and rules are what drives innovation. People want to hack the system and thus have to innovate. A completely hacked and open system doesn't really inspire new ideas, because the old ones just work fine already.
        • arjvik 2y ago
          You're talking about innovations in "working around the system." These are often orthogonal to innovations in actual tech.
      • mrguyorama 2y ago
        The US had an entire decade of war on cryptography that was literally required to safely transact on the internet, and yet the 90s had plenty of online store startups.
    • lukeramsden 2y ago
      Can start with the number of unicorns in USA vs Europe, especially when you take population in to account https://www.failory.com/unicorns https://www.failory.com/unicorns
• unethical_ban 2y ago
  I've heard offhand here that the ease of starting a business in general is easier in the US and that funding for tech startups is more available in the US due to policy. Totally hearsay from me.
  • kuschku 2y ago
    Regulation isn't going to stop innovation that much, or the tech industry wouldn't be in california. The primary difference is that the US is one homogenous, huge market. If I build something in California, to California's laws, and it becomes a success, I can immediately sell it across the entire rest of the US, and I can expand across the US, using the same employment contracts as in california, same lawyers as in california, etc. Sure, later on I can save money by making the Delaware version of my product with more cancerous chemicals, or have stricter NDAs in my Florida contracts. But if I start with California regulations, I can expand to the entire US with a small team of employees. There's nothing like that in Europe. If my product works in Germany, I'll need a french, spanish, italian translation to sell it in these countries. I can't just hire people from these countries either — they've got different holidays, different work hours, different unions I'll have to deal with. Different tax codes and agencies. And often these are conflicting with one another. In the US, I need one or two support shifts in one or two languages. In the EU I need 27. In the US, I need one version of the product, with one plug. In the EU, unless I'm okay with 10A and a plastic chassis, I need a dozen different versions. And even if the product can be used universally, European culture is significantly more diverse than US culture. Is a phone call at 7am or 8pm more appropriate? Depends on whether you're in Germany or Spain. When a job applicant includes a photo of themselves and lists their parents' degrees and jobs on their own CV, is that appropriate or not? In Germany, that's often expected, in many other regions, a huge no-go. To be successful in the US, I need to build one company. To be successful in the EU, I need to build a multinational corporation with 27 local branches.
    • drra 2y ago
      Also since national markets in Europe are relatively big by themselves a lot of companies tend to be satisfied with comfort of a single market success.
• mrtksn 2y ago
  It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online advertisement. They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing. It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it. Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.
  • influx 2y ago
    What's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?
    • mrtksn 2y ago
      Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.
      • simplyluke 2y ago
        I’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.
        • kube-system 2y ago
          Vacation time.
          • RestlessMind 2y ago
            Pfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s
• rallyforthesun 2y ago
  That someone can buy new DJI drones in europe is right, but only the latest releases. You cannot use any of the drones you might have purchased over the last years anymore in europe because of the new regulations.
  • coldtea 2y ago
    I don't think that's true. You just need some new firmware or something, no?
• freedomben 2y ago
  I think the situation is far more nuanced than what will be debateable here, but I've had friends that tried to do tech startups in Europe and ended up moving to the US and doing it here. This is surely not a representative sample so take with a grain of salt, but generally speaking this is their (paraphrased) analysis: In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched. Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.
  • permo-w 2y ago
    I suspect you're over-egging the amount of compliance that needs to be done and under-egging the filter of the existing big players mostly being American, who buy up competitors in order to maintain market dominance