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> The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictati

> The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in. Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it. Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.

birksherty 1y ago
If a company is so small and weak that they can't support GDPR etc., then that company should not exist. I don't care about any companies like Americans do with American business centric laws that hurts normal people. Life isn't about lowest price at any cost model. Buy from china (as everyone is doing but try to hide it) if you want low cost. I don't give a damn if all those companies die for not complying GDPR, fuck them.
- immibis 1y ago
  Even in Europe, small companies can often (not always) get away with not following regulations or only following them in spirit but missing the details, simply because they are small and do not attract attention. Some laws have escalating requirements based on business size. GDPR isn't one of those, but a lot of small businesses still don't follow it.
SSLy 1y ago
> Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers as much I'm not a fan of them, Leica is a peer competing against Nikon, Fujifilm, etc.
cm2012 1y ago
Yes. As someone who has worked with 100+ funded start-ups, roughly 85 in USA and 15 in EU - the EU ones have such a harder, trudging climb due to regulations.
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.
  - davidw 1y ago
    Things are pretty dire right now in the US, but to understand that... it's complicated and I don't think you can blindly reject everything from how things are done in the US. They all have to be reasoned about individually and as part of a bigger system.
    - overfeed 1y ago
      > I don't think you can blindly reject everything from how things are done in the US Sure, but I doubt there's any country in the world that aspires for its citizens to be treated like American consumers.
      - davidw 1y ago
        After having lived in Italy for years, there are some real upsides to being an American customer. Returning stuff that is genuinely not right in some way to a store in Italy is a huge PITA. Here? "I'd like to return this half-eaten thing of salsa, Costco" "sure, no problem!". Italy: "sorry, but grocery stores close on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday? Forget it!". That has subsequently changed, but it blew people's minds who weren't used to it. I could spend a lot of time comparing the relative benefits and drawbacks of both countries. The US has a lot of good things going for it which is what makes what is happening now all the more heartbreaking.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA. Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.
pjmlp 1y ago
SAP, Spotify, Sitecore, Roche, Airbus, CERN (the ecosystem powers its research), CodePlay, SN Systems, BAYER, Roche,....
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Since when is Airbus a small company and not part of the large state supported corp monopoly gang? Same with SAP, Roche and Bayer. These are all masive corporations that swallowed entire sectors. Same with Spotify having used its monopoly status to screw over smaller artists. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read such comments. Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies? I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones. Europe is just more stricter now with controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Easy, on the car companies that already exist with much better build quality. We don't need cars from fascists.
    - jonnybgood 1y ago
      > We don't need cars from fascists. To be fair, that’s not what they said. I believe they’re asking where are the car companies of Tesla’s size and market position.
Y-bar 1y ago
> Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. Competing in category chemicals: BASF, Akzo Nobel, Lanxess, Air Liquide, and a bunch others Competing in category engineering: Siemens, Bosch, ABB, Alstom, ThyssenKrupp, Airbus and a bunch others Competing in category metals: Aurubis, Umicore, Norsk Hydro, Gruppo Riva, ThyssenKrupp, and a bunch others Competing in category pharma: Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, Bayer, and others Competing in category electronics: Nokia, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Electrolux, Schneider Electric, and lots of others > any scaling company is instantly hamstrung You are assuming scaling this way is a long-term positive for consumers, investors, employees, and/or markets. I can find no such evidence.
- Aunche 1y ago
  All the companies that I've heard of that you listed were all founded before the EU.
- Tainnor 1y ago
  These are all huge companies in my view. In addition to them there are also countless small to medium sized companies that nobody's ever heard of, that don't experience hypergrowth but have slow and steady growth - especially in the B2B sector. I've worked at some such companies.
  - abirch 1y ago
    Siemens has 330,000 employees. I'd always consider that huge.
    - musicale 1y ago
      Only twice the size of mega-corps like Apple.
  - b112 1y ago
    All of this seems reasonable, and I see the value in keeping things competitive. I do have one concern though. Established markets are more entrenched, and hearing that smaller companies may have "slow and steady growth" here seems excellent. Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them. Being held back in such a market can be troublesome. So this is what I'd worry about.
achenet 1y ago
I work at OVH, we're European, we're actually good. I use our product, it's better than GCP for my use cases. We've got Hetzner in Germany doing the same thing we are.
pieds 1y ago
> The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it. And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions. The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA. To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to... Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model. Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country. Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards. Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country. Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so. For actually running a company it is a lot better now. There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.
Brian_K_White 1y ago
It costs practically nothing to comply with those regulations. It only costs to somehow keep doing the abusive things they exist to prevent. It's impossible to express how little sympathy this deserves.
troupo 1y ago
> The problem is that you pass DMA, Doesn't apply to your medium-sized company > DSA, Basically says "customers have the right to not be profiled and are entitled to not be shown algorithmic feeds" > GDPR Costs about 0 to implement as long as you only user data as intended, and not sending it off to 2763 "partners" who "respect your privacy". What "insane regulatory burden" are you talking about? > can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it. The only reason these poor poor innocent trillion-dollar supranational corporations fight these laws in court is because they really don't want anyone competing with them, or to respect such minor things as user privacy. Not because the laws are somehow bad or complicated. Even DMA, the most complex of them all, can be understood by anyone.

birksherty 1y ago

If a company is so small and weak that they can't support GDPR etc., then that company should not exist. I don't care about any companies like Americans do with American business centric laws that hurts normal people. Life isn't about lowest price at any cost model. Buy from china (as everyone is doing but try to hide it) if you want low cost. I don't give a damn if all those companies die for not complying GDPR, fuck them.

immibis 1y ago
Even in Europe, small companies can often (not always) get away with not following regulations or only following them in spirit but missing the details, simply because they are small and do not attract attention. Some laws have escalating requirements based on business size. GDPR isn't one of those, but a lot of small businesses still don't follow it.

SSLy 1y ago

> Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers as much I'm not a fan of them, Leica is a peer competing against Nikon, Fujifilm, etc.

cm2012 1y ago

Yes. As someone who has worked with 100+ funded start-ups, roughly 85 in USA and 15 in EU - the EU ones have such a harder, trudging climb due to regulations.

Disposal8433 1y ago
Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.
- davidw 1y ago
  Things are pretty dire right now in the US, but to understand that... it's complicated and I don't think you can blindly reject everything from how things are done in the US. They all have to be reasoned about individually and as part of a bigger system.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    > I don't think you can blindly reject everything from how things are done in the US Sure, but I doubt there's any country in the world that aspires for its citizens to be treated like American consumers.
    - davidw 1y ago
      After having lived in Italy for years, there are some real upsides to being an American customer. Returning stuff that is genuinely not right in some way to a store in Italy is a huge PITA. Here? "I'd like to return this half-eaten thing of salsa, Costco" "sure, no problem!". Italy: "sorry, but grocery stores close on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday? Forget it!". That has subsequently changed, but it blew people's minds who weren't used to it. I could spend a lot of time comparing the relative benefits and drawbacks of both countries. The US has a lot of good things going for it which is what makes what is happening now all the more heartbreaking.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA. Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.

pjmlp 1y ago

SAP, Spotify, Sitecore, Roche, Airbus, CERN (the ecosystem powers its research), CodePlay, SN Systems, BAYER, Roche,....

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Since when is Airbus a small company and not part of the large state supported corp monopoly gang? Same with SAP, Roche and Bayer. These are all masive corporations that swallowed entire sectors. Same with Spotify having used its monopoly status to screw over smaller artists. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read such comments. Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies? I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones. Europe is just more stricter now with controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Easy, on the car companies that already exist with much better build quality. We don't need cars from fascists.
  - jonnybgood 1y ago
    > We don't need cars from fascists. To be fair, that’s not what they said. I believe they’re asking where are the car companies of Tesla’s size and market position.

Y-bar 1y ago

> Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. Competing in category chemicals: BASF, Akzo Nobel, Lanxess, Air Liquide, and a bunch others Competing in category engineering: Siemens, Bosch, ABB, Alstom, ThyssenKrupp, Airbus and a bunch others Competing in category metals: Aurubis, Umicore, Norsk Hydro, Gruppo Riva, ThyssenKrupp, and a bunch others Competing in category pharma: Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, Bayer, and others Competing in category electronics: Nokia, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Electrolux, Schneider Electric, and lots of others > any scaling company is instantly hamstrung You are assuming scaling this way is a long-term positive for consumers, investors, employees, and/or markets. I can find no such evidence.

Aunche 1y ago
All the companies that I've heard of that you listed were all founded before the EU.
Tainnor 1y ago
These are all huge companies in my view. In addition to them there are also countless small to medium sized companies that nobody's ever heard of, that don't experience hypergrowth but have slow and steady growth - especially in the B2B sector. I've worked at some such companies.
- abirch 1y ago
  Siemens has 330,000 employees. I'd always consider that huge.
  - musicale 1y ago
    Only twice the size of mega-corps like Apple.
- b112 1y ago
  All of this seems reasonable, and I see the value in keeping things competitive. I do have one concern though. Established markets are more entrenched, and hearing that smaller companies may have "slow and steady growth" here seems excellent. Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them. Being held back in such a market can be troublesome. So this is what I'd worry about.

achenet 1y ago

I work at OVH, we're European, we're actually good. I use our product, it's better than GCP for my use cases. We've got Hetzner in Germany doing the same thing we are.

pieds 1y ago

> The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it. And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions. The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA. To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to... Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model. Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country. Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards. Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country. Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so. For actually running a company it is a lot better now. There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.

Brian_K_White 1y ago

It costs practically nothing to comply with those regulations. It only costs to somehow keep doing the abusive things they exist to prevent. It's impossible to express how little sympathy this deserves.

troupo 1y ago

> The problem is that you pass DMA, Doesn't apply to your medium-sized company > DSA, Basically says "customers have the right to not be profiled and are entitled to not be shown algorithmic feeds" > GDPR Costs about 0 to implement as long as you only user data as intended, and not sending it off to 2763 "partners" who "respect your privacy". What "insane regulatory burden" are you talking about? > can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it. The only reason these poor poor innocent trillion-dollar supranational corporations fight these laws in court is because they really don't want anyone competing with them, or to respect such minor things as user privacy. Not because the laws are somehow bad or complicated. Even DMA, the most complex of them all, can be understood by anyone.