In all the discussion about Silicon Valley and why no place else has been able to have quite so much success in high tech, subtle cultural issues can be underem

In all the discussion about Silicon Valley and why no place else has been able to have quite so much success in high tech, subtle cultural issues can be underemphasized because they aren't easily quantified. This attitude toward freedom of speech and data in the EU is one reason why startups don't prosper as well there. For a society to allow and even encourage independent people to create new ways to collaborate with data is risky to existing powers. Most societies place restrictions on who can know or say things and then impose severe consequences on the people about whom those things are said. Sometimes the restrictions and consequences are informal. There may be a strong norm against sharing data or gossiping or spying or publishing. There may be a strong sense of reputation or face or a presumption that bad things said about you make you a bad person and unemployable. The EU is a place where people have lived with the idea that central authorities can tell individuals what to say or not say for a long time. The large news and data institutions and churches have strong links to the state and individuals are not expected to be able to make choices about information for themselves. Political parties are routinely banned and prosecuted solely for disagreeing with ruling parties; elected officials have been prosecuted and jailed in France and the Netherlands in this decade merely for being leaders of the minority parties in their national and EU legislatures. [0] A certain confidence that anything officially published is endorsed by powerful people lingers weakly as a result. People don't like small companies, startups, individuals controlling data as a result. China and Japan are the same, though each in its own way, of course, just as each European culture is different. But America is an outlier. We trust our government and newspapers less. We expect authorities' pronouncements to have less effect on our prospects and reputations. We share data freely and expect that people can gossip about us freely with limited consequences. We even expect a certain amount of lying to go on without being prohibited, though it upsets us more because we've developed stronger norms against it than nations where authorities are expected to have the power routinely to deceive the people like the EU. And in tech, where information is everything, that cultural approbation for data is deeply though subtly influential. It's one of the many things that make US startups and especially Silicon Valley ones more successful. Which isn't to day that this EU decision is a bad thing for startups. It's bad for Google, but that's not all startups. It creates an opening for an American company to provide a search engine that fills in Google's EU gaps. EU companies might be able to find ways to exploit it, too. It does reflect one of the cultural advantages of Silicon Valley, though. Along with the esteem for entrepreneurs, openness to failure, flexible job market, and network effects, freedom of speech is a business advantage in tech. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Geert_Wilders http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Geert_Wilders http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/marine-le-pen-immunity-lifted http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/marine-le-pen-i...