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This continent is hellbent on descending into irrelevancy and self-destruction. Bright spots include AI research and some spots related to it, like Paris AI co

This continent is hellbent on descending into irrelevancy and self-destruction. Bright spots include AI research and some spots related to it, like Paris AI community, but the regulators can quickly kill that. To just register a digital business and make one euro, an average American would cry out laughing.

littlestymaar 2y ago
> just register a digital business and make one euro, an average American would cry out laughing. At least in my country (France) it's not any harder than registering as an independent worker (you often use the exact same legal vehicle for both). The real problem with European tech is that it's too easy for US company to land on the continent, and since they have a biggest market to begin with they always end up stronger than European companies when it comes to addressing the other European markets. The “single market” is a fantasy, every country has its own language, culture and business practices, things that EU's homogenization of regulations between country since the 80s have never overcome and never could have, and because of that it's not harder for an American company to do business in an EU country that it is for another European country. Since forced homogenization isn't gonna do it, the correct approach would be to put barriers to foreign entry like Evey successful Asian country did in the second half of the 20th century with great success. Advocating for free trade with a much more powerful country than your is as insane as it would be to advocate to remove the fences in a zoo…
- mathverse 2y ago
  The problem is euro-racism and not much integration of workers and businesses in EU. A successful french startup means a loss of jobs and wealth to other countries. DACH customers will prefer working with DACH companies, French customers will prefer working with French startups. If you dont work in english speaking environment (IT) moving countries within EU is practically impossible for people working normal jobs.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Yes, this is entirely true as well. Though US companies face this effect as well. But as a result EU companies get practically no competitive advantage compared to an American company when they want to operate in other EU countries, and if the EU wants to exist this imbalance of power need to be addressed or it will keep snowballing.
- TheChaplain 2y ago
  The EU regulatory burden is the real culprit, it stifles international reach and makes it much more expensive for small companies. Not saying all regulations are bad, I like a lot of them, but if you have a company in the EU, especially one in the manufacturing industry then you know.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Yet regulation is nowhere to be seen in the leading complaints from French manufacturing companies (which means it's way behind the price of energy, the lack of qualified workforce, and the lack of capital). It also doesn't prevent international actors to arrive in the EU market, and from personal experience it's easier to do business in the EU when you are an American company than the opposite by a significant margin.
- barrenko 2y ago
  I'll check French registration!
tzs 2y ago
Here's what it took for the small American company I work at to get registered to sell downloadable digital goods from our American web site to EU customers: • About 15 minutes or so on the website of the Irish tax authorities. Once we started selling, here's the ongoing burden: • Collect VAT at the VAT rate of the country the customer is in. • Early on in each quarter run a script that produces a report that shows our total sales for each EU country and how much VAT we collected for that country. • Upload that report to the Irish tax authorities and give them the total VAT we collected. The Irish tax authorities deal with reporting our sales to the other countries and distributing the collected VAT to them. • Keep our VAT rate table up to date. Unlike sales tax in the US VAT rates rarely change. Looking at our database of VAT rates I see an average of 1.7 rate changes per year over the last several years. That's 1.7 changes per year for the whole EU, not per country. When VAT changes it almost always changes on a quarter boundary (I think I've only seen one or two times when it changed during a quarter). Since the rates are per country there aren't many of them. It would not be too much hassle to simply download the rates from some EU government site and manually update our rate DB. What we actually do is use an API from apilayer.com. Their free tier allows 1000 requests per year which is way more than are needed to keep up with VAT changes since it is one API call to get the rates for all of the EU. We used Ireland because English is one of their official languages. We could have picked any other EU country to deal with instead of Ireland, although the registering and reporting details would differ so registering and reporting might not be as easy. Compare to what an American company that wants to sell to multiple American states has to do to deal with sales tax. The tax depends on the exact address of the buyer, not just the state, and you have to register and file with each state. Generally dealing with that means you have to use a paid service which will charge a percentage of your sales. If you only need to collect tax in the states that have joined the Streamlines Sales Tax group you can get a sort of EU like experience. To that you have to agree to collect tax for all of the SST states even if you only are actually legally required to collect for some of them, and then you can use a paid tax service from their list and the SST states will pay the cost of that. If you need to collect tax for any of the approximately half the states not part of SST then you'll have to deal with those states separately.

littlestymaar 2y ago

> just register a digital business and make one euro, an average American would cry out laughing. At least in my country (France) it's not any harder than registering as an independent worker (you often use the exact same legal vehicle for both). The real problem with European tech is that it's too easy for US company to land on the continent, and since they have a biggest market to begin with they always end up stronger than European companies when it comes to addressing the other European markets. The “single market” is a fantasy, every country has its own language, culture and business practices, things that EU's homogenization of regulations between country since the 80s have never overcome and never could have, and because of that it's not harder for an American company to do business in an EU country that it is for another European country. Since forced homogenization isn't gonna do it, the correct approach would be to put barriers to foreign entry like Evey successful Asian country did in the second half of the 20th century with great success. Advocating for free trade with a much more powerful country than your is as insane as it would be to advocate to remove the fences in a zoo…

mathverse 2y ago
The problem is euro-racism and not much integration of workers and businesses in EU. A successful french startup means a loss of jobs and wealth to other countries. DACH customers will prefer working with DACH companies, French customers will prefer working with French startups. If you dont work in english speaking environment (IT) moving countries within EU is practically impossible for people working normal jobs.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Yes, this is entirely true as well. Though US companies face this effect as well. But as a result EU companies get practically no competitive advantage compared to an American company when they want to operate in other EU countries, and if the EU wants to exist this imbalance of power need to be addressed or it will keep snowballing.
TheChaplain 2y ago
The EU regulatory burden is the real culprit, it stifles international reach and makes it much more expensive for small companies. Not saying all regulations are bad, I like a lot of them, but if you have a company in the EU, especially one in the manufacturing industry then you know.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Yet regulation is nowhere to be seen in the leading complaints from French manufacturing companies (which means it's way behind the price of energy, the lack of qualified workforce, and the lack of capital). It also doesn't prevent international actors to arrive in the EU market, and from personal experience it's easier to do business in the EU when you are an American company than the opposite by a significant margin.
barrenko 2y ago
I'll check French registration!

tzs 2y ago

Here's what it took for the small American company I work at to get registered to sell downloadable digital goods from our American web site to EU customers: • About 15 minutes or so on the website of the Irish tax authorities. Once we started selling, here's the ongoing burden: • Collect VAT at the VAT rate of the country the customer is in. • Early on in each quarter run a script that produces a report that shows our total sales for each EU country and how much VAT we collected for that country. • Upload that report to the Irish tax authorities and give them the total VAT we collected. The Irish tax authorities deal with reporting our sales to the other countries and distributing the collected VAT to them. • Keep our VAT rate table up to date. Unlike sales tax in the US VAT rates rarely change. Looking at our database of VAT rates I see an average of 1.7 rate changes per year over the last several years. That's 1.7 changes per year for the whole EU, not per country. When VAT changes it almost always changes on a quarter boundary (I think I've only seen one or two times when it changed during a quarter). Since the rates are per country there aren't many of them. It would not be too much hassle to simply download the rates from some EU government site and manually update our rate DB. What we actually do is use an API from apilayer.com. Their free tier allows 1000 requests per year which is way more than are needed to keep up with VAT changes since it is one API call to get the rates for all of the EU. We used Ireland because English is one of their official languages. We could have picked any other EU country to deal with instead of Ireland, although the registering and reporting details would differ so registering and reporting might not be as easy. Compare to what an American company that wants to sell to multiple American states has to do to deal with sales tax. The tax depends on the exact address of the buyer, not just the state, and you have to register and file with each state. Generally dealing with that means you have to use a paid service which will charge a percentage of your sales. If you only need to collect tax in the states that have joined the Streamlines Sales Tax group you can get a sort of EU like experience. To that you have to agree to collect tax for all of the SST states even if you only are actually legally required to collect for some of them, and then you can use a paid tax service from their list and the SST states will pay the cost of that. If you need to collect tax for any of the approximately half the states not part of SST then you'll have to deal with those states separately.