9 ms·

Europe v Google: Nothing to stand on

68 points by msabalau 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago
Probably because the EU was "unnaturally" pushed into doing this without fully understanding what they're doing: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-an-antitrust-target-is-now-googles-regulatory-scold.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-...
- WildUtah 12y ago
  Microsoft is just the evil empire that keeps on giving. The Windows monopoly is weaker than ever, but the scam patents and the PR machine to drive out competition are still moving politics to keep Microsoft's fading monopolies powerful enough to slow progress in the industry.
- cromwellian 12y ago
  Regulatory Capture.
tajen 12y ago
I've worked outside EU in an awesome startup. The VP of engineering went for a worldwide tour of hype IT capacities, to learn how the like of Twitter, Facebook, Volkswagen or Barcklays perform top-of-the-class software development nowadays. He made a blogpost of about 700 lines about worldwide companies. Europe was at the bottom, in 5 lines: "Europe: Nothing interesting. These guys haven't even moved to Agile after 13 years". I felt insulted but I have to reckon he summarized it well. I'm a sole trader with a "product" strat-up in France. I spend about 10% of my time on paperwork. I've have a police inspection yesterday "because I'm flatsharing". We have mandatory taxes and charges of about 70% [1]. There's no way we can become big. [1] Income tax: 20%, Mandatory unemployment/state/health benefits 46%, VAT 20%, land tax $300 for using my own flat for professional purpose, corporate tax, mandatory non-computerized accountant $2800, bank $300, and unclear legislation compared to, say, UK, requiring hours and hours of reading and tax dodging.
- ptaipale 12y ago
  You have to pay tax if you run a company at home? Wow. That's not all of Europe, though, this must be a French peculiarity.
  - krzyk 12y ago
    Not only France, same in Poland.
    - ptaipale 12y ago
      The taxman cannot in reality come and check your home to see whether you actually work there or not. Can you rent a brass plate address somewhere which has a nominal working place, on a cheap rent? A room in a warehouse in an industrial area could be shared by several (let's say thousands) or people who actually work at home but claim a company residence there. Yes, criminal, but not immoral...
      - DanBC 12y ago
        I think you under estimate European bureaucracy. While they don't visit every home they do visit some. As you say tax evasion is criminal; it's a really bad idea to lie to tax authorities. Here's the UK government talking about visiting your home to check your business accounts if you run a business from that home and they want to check your compliance. https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks
        ptaipale 12y ago
        Of course you must not lie to tax authorities, but matters are often up to an interpretation and it is not unreasonable that there's a business address even if in reality a person does not want to incur every day the expense, emissions and enmity of traffic in order to travel to that place of business. In Helsinki, we did have this silly "let's chase the home offices" bureaucracy in 1970's and 1980's but that hunt went to grave at the same time with the Soviet Union, deservedly.
meowface 12y ago
>Google (whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) told staff in an internal memo that it has a “very strong case” to make against all the allegations. I'm glad to see disclosures like these.
s3r3nity 12y ago
Is no one going to address the validitiy of their arguments against Google? If you've followed HN / Reddit the past few days, you would've thought that the EU is some crazy entity of whack-jobs. But I can't find much in the way of analysis of why this might seem actually be a worthy debate.
- magicalist 12y ago
  The problem is that the Statement of Objections is private and will apparently remain that way for some time (this article says "many months"), so no one really knows what the arguments are (except the European Commission, Google, and presumably folks like "Fair Search").
skrebbel 12y ago
Seriously? The whole story is about search and ads, and thus the Economist concludes with: > But rather than trying to rein in American firms, European politicians should focus on fixing what is holding back the old world’s most promising platforms: the lack of a common digital market. Today only 15% of consumers shop online across borders within the EU. So to fix a monopolist in search abusing its position, the EU needs to make it easier for me to buy shoes from Poland with simpler VAT laws. How are those related at all? There's probably plenty of reasons why no European PhD dropouts started a successful search company, but cross border e-commerce isn't one of them.
- blfr 12y ago
  Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people. Google's internal response[1] covers it inadvertently. They show stats for various European markets with competition in the shopping category, mostly with other American companies. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951
  - skrebbel 12y ago
    > Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people. Yes, but search is very low on the list of industries where that matters. Plenty European internet companies have trouble getting outside their founding country, sure, but the trouble is language, culture, lack of a unified media landscape, etc, not VAT rules. Anybody who tells you different is just trying to find a scapegoat for their inability to execute cross-culture. This indeed makes Europe a more difficult starting point, but good luck fixing that with politics.
    - blfr 12y ago
      The whole started with Google's addition of shopping results to their regular search results and later expanded to Android, I think.
Oletros 12y ago
> But rather than trying to rein in American firms Taking into account that the most fined companies regarding anti trust proceedings are European, I don't know how this claim is not BS
makeitsuckless 12y ago
This article is completely devoid of any coherent argument. It doesn't even bother to make any connection between the Google anti-trust case and it's sole argument (besides using the words "digital" and "American"), which is "open the borders and abandon your laws in the name of capitalism". An argument that incidentally ignores the fact that when it comes to digital services, the primary barrier that stops Europe from being a single market like the US is language and culture, not regulation, and no amount of libertarian ideology is going to solve that. The fact that it has been upvoted to the front page is basically just the standard pro-Google anti-EU circlejerk, I doubt any of the voters actually read this nonsense.
EdwardDiego 12y ago
Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe? Just because the EU exists, doesn't mean that Europe is suddenly an equivalent to the 52 states of the US. Different countries within the EU have different laws, different markets, different cultures, different ways of doing business, and most obviously, different languages. Germany is different to France is different to the UK is different to the Czech Republic is different to Turkey. This is why there's no single "European search engine" - and this is why America is the most attractive (and competed in) market for digital products - it's huge, well-off, and it's a lot more homogenous (at least in language and general culture) than Europe.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  > Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe? I'm not entirely sure what you're responding to, but the Economist is a European publication.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    Ah, you're right. (I was reading this earlier submission on the same matter: http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-against-silicon-valley-will-backfire-3.html http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-agains... and lumped the two together). Although I would probably expand that out to ask why people from the UK also like to reason about (continental) Europe as a singular entity also, when they should certainly know better.
    - ptaipale 12y ago
      There's so often fog in the Channel, and the continent is cut off.
- gitah 12y ago
  This is exactly what was said in the article. The EU isn't a common market for internet companies so EU startups can't scale the same way as US ones. People are talking about the EU as a blob because the EU as a blob is the one making the anti-trust accusations.
zaroth 12y ago
With opinions like these, no wonder they're looking to tax Google for its success: “Our online businesses are today dependent on a few non- EU players,” said Mr Oettinger. “This must not be the case again in the future.” So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything they are doing would be fine?
- neuronic 12y ago
  Yes it would and this is called politics. It is a game that is thousands of years old and I am glad you are waking up to it.
- Oletros 12y ago
  > So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything they are doing would be fine? No, it would be exactly the same

68 points by msabalau 12y ago

Probably because the EU was "unnaturally" pushed into doing this without fully understanding what they're doing: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-an-antitrust-target-is-now-googles-regulatory-scold.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-...

WildUtah 12y ago
Microsoft is just the evil empire that keeps on giving. The Windows monopoly is weaker than ever, but the scam patents and the PR machine to drive out competition are still moving politics to keep Microsoft's fading monopolies powerful enough to slow progress in the industry.
cromwellian 12y ago
Regulatory Capture.

tajen 12y ago

I've worked outside EU in an awesome startup. The VP of engineering went for a worldwide tour of hype IT capacities, to learn how the like of Twitter, Facebook, Volkswagen or Barcklays perform top-of-the-class software development nowadays. He made a blogpost of about 700 lines about worldwide companies. Europe was at the bottom, in 5 lines: "Europe: Nothing interesting. These guys haven't even moved to Agile after 13 years". I felt insulted but I have to reckon he summarized it well. I'm a sole trader with a "product" strat-up in France. I spend about 10% of my time on paperwork. I've have a police inspection yesterday "because I'm flatsharing". We have mandatory taxes and charges of about 70% [1]. There's no way we can become big. [1] Income tax: 20%, Mandatory unemployment/state/health benefits 46%, VAT 20%, land tax $300 for using my own flat for professional purpose, corporate tax, mandatory non-computerized accountant $2800, bank $300, and unclear legislation compared to, say, UK, requiring hours and hours of reading and tax dodging.

ptaipale 12y ago
You have to pay tax if you run a company at home? Wow. That's not all of Europe, though, this must be a French peculiarity.
- krzyk 12y ago
  Not only France, same in Poland.
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    The taxman cannot in reality come and check your home to see whether you actually work there or not. Can you rent a brass plate address somewhere which has a nominal working place, on a cheap rent? A room in a warehouse in an industrial area could be shared by several (let's say thousands) or people who actually work at home but claim a company residence there. Yes, criminal, but not immoral...
    - DanBC 12y ago
      I think you under estimate European bureaucracy. While they don't visit every home they do visit some. As you say tax evasion is criminal; it's a really bad idea to lie to tax authorities. Here's the UK government talking about visiting your home to check your business accounts if you run a business from that home and they want to check your compliance. https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks
      - ptaipale 12y ago
        Of course you must not lie to tax authorities, but matters are often up to an interpretation and it is not unreasonable that there's a business address even if in reality a person does not want to incur every day the expense, emissions and enmity of traffic in order to travel to that place of business. In Helsinki, we did have this silly "let's chase the home offices" bureaucracy in 1970's and 1980's but that hunt went to grave at the same time with the Soviet Union, deservedly.

meowface 12y ago

>Google (whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) told staff in an internal memo that it has a “very strong case” to make against all the allegations. I'm glad to see disclosures like these.

s3r3nity 12y ago

Is no one going to address the validitiy of their arguments against Google? If you've followed HN / Reddit the past few days, you would've thought that the EU is some crazy entity of whack-jobs. But I can't find much in the way of analysis of why this might seem actually be a worthy debate.

magicalist 12y ago
The problem is that the Statement of Objections is private and will apparently remain that way for some time (this article says "many months"), so no one really knows what the arguments are (except the European Commission, Google, and presumably folks like "Fair Search").

skrebbel 12y ago

Seriously? The whole story is about search and ads, and thus the Economist concludes with: > But rather than trying to rein in American firms, European politicians should focus on fixing what is holding back the old world’s most promising platforms: the lack of a common digital market. Today only 15% of consumers shop online across borders within the EU. So to fix a monopolist in search abusing its position, the EU needs to make it easier for me to buy shoes from Poland with simpler VAT laws. How are those related at all? There's probably plenty of reasons why no European PhD dropouts started a successful search company, but cross border e-commerce isn't one of them.

blfr 12y ago
Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people. Google's internal response[1] covers it inadvertently. They show stats for various European markets with competition in the shopping category, mostly with other American companies. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951
- skrebbel 12y ago
  > Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people. Yes, but search is very low on the list of industries where that matters. Plenty European internet companies have trouble getting outside their founding country, sure, but the trouble is language, culture, lack of a unified media landscape, etc, not VAT rules. Anybody who tells you different is just trying to find a scapegoat for their inability to execute cross-culture. This indeed makes Europe a more difficult starting point, but good luck fixing that with politics.
  - blfr 12y ago
    The whole started with Google's addition of shopping results to their regular search results and later expanded to Android, I think.

Oletros 12y ago

> But rather than trying to rein in American firms Taking into account that the most fined companies regarding anti trust proceedings are European, I don't know how this claim is not BS

makeitsuckless 12y ago

This article is completely devoid of any coherent argument. It doesn't even bother to make any connection between the Google anti-trust case and it's sole argument (besides using the words "digital" and "American"), which is "open the borders and abandon your laws in the name of capitalism". An argument that incidentally ignores the fact that when it comes to digital services, the primary barrier that stops Europe from being a single market like the US is language and culture, not regulation, and no amount of libertarian ideology is going to solve that. The fact that it has been upvoted to the front page is basically just the standard pro-Google anti-EU circlejerk, I doubt any of the voters actually read this nonsense.

EdwardDiego 12y ago

Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe? Just because the EU exists, doesn't mean that Europe is suddenly an equivalent to the 52 states of the US. Different countries within the EU have different laws, different markets, different cultures, different ways of doing business, and most obviously, different languages. Germany is different to France is different to the UK is different to the Czech Republic is different to Turkey. This is why there's no single "European search engine" - and this is why America is the most attractive (and competed in) market for digital products - it's huge, well-off, and it's a lot more homogenous (at least in language and general culture) than Europe.

skrebbel 12y ago
> Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe? I'm not entirely sure what you're responding to, but the Economist is a European publication.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  Ah, you're right. (I was reading this earlier submission on the same matter: http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-against-silicon-valley-will-backfire-3.html http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-agains... and lumped the two together). Although I would probably expand that out to ask why people from the UK also like to reason about (continental) Europe as a singular entity also, when they should certainly know better.
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    There's so often fog in the Channel, and the continent is cut off.
gitah 12y ago
This is exactly what was said in the article. The EU isn't a common market for internet companies so EU startups can't scale the same way as US ones. People are talking about the EU as a blob because the EU as a blob is the one making the anti-trust accusations.

zaroth 12y ago

With opinions like these, no wonder they're looking to tax Google for its success: “Our online businesses are today dependent on a few non- EU players,” said Mr Oettinger. “This must not be the case again in the future.” So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything they are doing would be fine?

neuronic 12y ago
Yes it would and this is called politics. It is a game that is thousands of years old and I am glad you are waking up to it.
Oletros 12y ago
> So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything they are doing would be fine? No, it would be exactly the same