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While I'm not necessarily against GDPR and regulations, is undeniable that the regulatory landscape in Europe has been preventing innovation. In fact it's tech

While I'm not necessarily against GDPR and regulations, is undeniable that the regulatory landscape in Europe has been preventing innovation. In fact it's tech market is predominantly dominated by US tech companies (and probably soon Chinese ones as well)

frabert 2y ago
I'll try and spin it a different way -- What if the US and China had been unfairly taking advantage of their lax rules to bring innovation to the damage of their (and other countries') citizens, much like China has been unfairly exploiting its own lower standards of living and personal freedom to gain advantage in terms of manufacturing power against the US and Europe?
- EGreg 2y ago
  Unfairly? That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities… It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang. ====== The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead. What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
  - frabert 2y ago
    I was talking "fairness" from the point of view of the EU in this case, and it is the exact sense that you are delineating in your addendum at the end of the comment. It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
    - nickpp 2y ago
      > sane working hours So it's "unfair" when others work harder than us?! > right to express discontent against the government Last time I checked, the USA had "freer" speech than the EU.
      - immibis 2y ago
        It's unfair that in your country you decide nobody should have to work more than a certain amount, and then you make other people work more than that amount in a different country instead, yes.
        nickpp 2y ago
        Fascinating mindset! So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum? Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
        immibis 2y ago
        It's unfair if the teacher gives lower grades to other students because of that student.
        nickpp 2y ago
- zbshqoa 2y ago
  Ya cool, does this change the result? No. Europe has no competitors to the US/Chinese tech giants and their citizens want to use technology like anybody else without a layer of bureaucracy preventing them from doing basic stuff. I don't think European citizens have been forced to use Uber, Airbnb, Apple, Android, Facebook , WhatsApp and so on.
  - immibis 2y ago
    The main food deliverers (Uber Eats clones) here are Dutch and Swedish. The place you can find someone's apartment to stay in temporarily is German. The Fediverse was invented here, in Germany. Ride-sharing companies are Estonian, German, and some others I don't remember. There are no companies that rise meteorically, capture billions of users and then collapse if they can't monetize. There are just companies that quietly provide products and services users want. If that's considered a failure to you, then... okay? Signal is American, but Telegram is Russian. And you can just, you know, send a text message, without involving any third party (but both your phone companies can see it). Oh and the b2b companies... like ASML and SWIFT.
    - zbshqoa 2y ago
      You conveniently left our everything else I mention and those companies aren't really leading. Bolt for example has an edge because everywhere in Europe they're been killing Uber or limiting it hardly, and in some countries it's still the case. In most cases those companies are knockoffs of American companies and you've yet to mention cases were Europe is actually leading the way (aside from some unique cases it doesn't happen regularly) P.s. Russia is not part of Europe, you can safely leave it out (and yes they've plenty of competitors to american companies telegram, Yandex, VK etc. we can't say the same for Europe)
      - immibis 2y ago
        If you're arguing that Europe killed Uber by making it follow common-sense regulations, you could just ask well argue that the USA killed Bolt by not. Europeans simply do not see why they should try to "innovate" the American way: creating products that no one actually needs, and trying to get people to buy them anyway, often by killing the alternatives, which often results in more work, lower wages and higher prices for everyone. Europeans (other than AfD voters) would rather have a good enough society that stays good enough and doesn't decay.
cbg0 2y ago
While companies will always follow the path of least resistance and prefer as little regulation as possible to make money without a lot of headaches, most people will prefer their privacy be respected and their data not sold-off without their approval or used in undocumented ways, even if it leads to less innovation in the corporate landscape.
tmnvdb 2y ago
Regulation is only a small part of the story. Keep in mind that GDPR was implemented in 2018, long after Europe lost the tech battle. The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments. Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.
- nickpp 2y ago
  There are other regulations making entrepreneurship quasi-impossible in the EU, not just GDPR. For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.
  - tmnvdb 2y ago
    That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership. On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers. Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation. If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding. Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
tokai 2y ago
A bit like a helmet prevents the pavement innovating your skull.
- nickpp 2y ago
  There are countries that decided against compulsory helmet laws for bikers on the basis that biking health benefits outweigh the risks. When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.
  - tokai 2y ago
    The analogy was about motorcycle helmets, so no.
- tmnvdb 2y ago
  The country with by far the highest number of people riding a bike (The Netherlands) does not have any helmet rules.
  - sandermvanvliet 2y ago
    But the number of incidents with head injuries is increasing because more (elderly) people are riding e-bikes for longer than they would have a normal bike. As reaction times slow with age this is not a great combo with a faster bike which is a cause to more incidents. There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this
immibis 2y ago
What do you consider innovation? Was a certain regulation the reason DeepSeek-R1 didn't happen in Europe?

frabert 2y ago

I'll try and spin it a different way -- What if the US and China had been unfairly taking advantage of their lax rules to bring innovation to the damage of their (and other countries') citizens, much like China has been unfairly exploiting its own lower standards of living and personal freedom to gain advantage in terms of manufacturing power against the US and Europe?

EGreg 2y ago
Unfairly? That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities… It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang. ====== The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead. What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
- frabert 2y ago
  I was talking "fairness" from the point of view of the EU in this case, and it is the exact sense that you are delineating in your addendum at the end of the comment. It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
  - nickpp 2y ago
    > sane working hours So it's "unfair" when others work harder than us?! > right to express discontent against the government Last time I checked, the USA had "freer" speech than the EU.
    - immibis 2y ago
      It's unfair that in your country you decide nobody should have to work more than a certain amount, and then you make other people work more than that amount in a different country instead, yes.
      - nickpp 2y ago
        Fascinating mindset! So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum? Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
        immibis 2y ago
        It's unfair if the teacher gives lower grades to other students because of that student.
        nickpp 2y ago
zbshqoa 2y ago
Ya cool, does this change the result? No. Europe has no competitors to the US/Chinese tech giants and their citizens want to use technology like anybody else without a layer of bureaucracy preventing them from doing basic stuff. I don't think European citizens have been forced to use Uber, Airbnb, Apple, Android, Facebook , WhatsApp and so on.
- immibis 2y ago
  The main food deliverers (Uber Eats clones) here are Dutch and Swedish. The place you can find someone's apartment to stay in temporarily is German. The Fediverse was invented here, in Germany. Ride-sharing companies are Estonian, German, and some others I don't remember. There are no companies that rise meteorically, capture billions of users and then collapse if they can't monetize. There are just companies that quietly provide products and services users want. If that's considered a failure to you, then... okay? Signal is American, but Telegram is Russian. And you can just, you know, send a text message, without involving any third party (but both your phone companies can see it). Oh and the b2b companies... like ASML and SWIFT.
  - zbshqoa 2y ago
    You conveniently left our everything else I mention and those companies aren't really leading. Bolt for example has an edge because everywhere in Europe they're been killing Uber or limiting it hardly, and in some countries it's still the case. In most cases those companies are knockoffs of American companies and you've yet to mention cases were Europe is actually leading the way (aside from some unique cases it doesn't happen regularly) P.s. Russia is not part of Europe, you can safely leave it out (and yes they've plenty of competitors to american companies telegram, Yandex, VK etc. we can't say the same for Europe)
    - immibis 2y ago
      If you're arguing that Europe killed Uber by making it follow common-sense regulations, you could just ask well argue that the USA killed Bolt by not. Europeans simply do not see why they should try to "innovate" the American way: creating products that no one actually needs, and trying to get people to buy them anyway, often by killing the alternatives, which often results in more work, lower wages and higher prices for everyone. Europeans (other than AfD voters) would rather have a good enough society that stays good enough and doesn't decay.

cbg0 2y ago

While companies will always follow the path of least resistance and prefer as little regulation as possible to make money without a lot of headaches, most people will prefer their privacy be respected and their data not sold-off without their approval or used in undocumented ways, even if it leads to less innovation in the corporate landscape.

tmnvdb 2y ago

Regulation is only a small part of the story. Keep in mind that GDPR was implemented in 2018, long after Europe lost the tech battle. The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments. Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.

nickpp 2y ago
There are other regulations making entrepreneurship quasi-impossible in the EU, not just GDPR. For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.
- tmnvdb 2y ago
  That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership. On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers. Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation. If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding. Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.

tokai 2y ago

A bit like a helmet prevents the pavement innovating your skull.

nickpp 2y ago
There are countries that decided against compulsory helmet laws for bikers on the basis that biking health benefits outweigh the risks. When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.
- tokai 2y ago
  The analogy was about motorcycle helmets, so no.
tmnvdb 2y ago
The country with by far the highest number of people riding a bike (The Netherlands) does not have any helmet rules.
- sandermvanvliet 2y ago
  But the number of incidents with head injuries is increasing because more (elderly) people are riding e-bikes for longer than they would have a normal bike. As reaction times slow with age this is not a great combo with a faster bike which is a cause to more incidents. There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this

immibis 2y ago

What do you consider innovation? Was a certain regulation the reason DeepSeek-R1 didn't happen in Europe?