Why do they gate access at country level if it's about language. I live in Europe and speak English just fine. Can't they just offer it in English only until the multi-language support is ready?
Yep, there is a big reason why Europe has so few successful big tech companies, it is a regulatory hellscape. They have so many pointless privacy regulations that only the “big” companies can even hope to compete in many markets like ad tech.
There is a big reason why the USA outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle has so few successful big tech companies: because success begets success and capital breeds more capital. If it was just European regulation you'd expect SV equivalents everywhere except for Europe. That didn't happen.
And the last thing we need is more competition in ad tech.
Given the size and abuses by the existing ad tech giants, why do you say they last thing we need is more competition. wouldn't more competition mean they have less money and get away with less and have to behave better?
No, we need them to go away. Like the dinosaurs or the Dodo. Because competition between ad tech giants means the public is collateral damage in the ensuing war. That's because the advertiser money flows to the ad tech company that is most efficient at extracting dollars from their audience. Even a .1% increase is enough to swing the battle, and that arms race has been running since 1994 or so, the results are there for all to see.
As much as we would like them to magically disappear and get uninvented, like NFTs, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism by which that realistically happens. So then, like harm reduction, isn't more competition better than less? It means less money goes to the existing giants, which may not totally starve them, but will put them on a diet.
Silicon Valley equivalents are brimming up in other parts of the world, Taiwan is very much known for its hardware technology. There are documentaries about Shenzhen becoming a tech hub too. Even here in Bangalore (India), there are many tech companies doing massive amount of good work.
But they're also right in the sense that regulation acts like a barrier in many parts of the world. I had often wondered why did Linus Torvalds and other Engineers travelled to Silicon Valley to found Linux, etc? Did they not find opportunity in Finland or any other nearby European countries?
That's because once you have a runaway success the US will tax you lower and your quality of life will be higher than what you can achieve in Europe. The USA is a great country if you're on to a winner. So the vacuum cleaner in SV tends to suck the air out of a lot of EU successful start-ups and engineering efforts simply because that's where the money is. Typical start-up valuations in the USA dwarf those in Europe, access to a single unified and mostly mono-lingual market are far more of a factor than any EU regulations, that's just a dumb meme that gets tossed around by the clueless. Yes, taxes are higher. But so is average quality of life, as opposed to average GDP, which relies on outliers.
Despite being less wealthy and diverse in both language and culture, China and India produce more tech unicorns than the EU. Several smaller countries, like Singapore and Israel also do far better than the EU on a per-capita basis.
I'd attribute most of the gap to regulatory and cultural difference.
EU is also not uniform in terms of language - so most EU companies need to decide whether they go global and start in a foreign (English) language or begin in their native language and risk getting locked in there.
I’ve been mentoring startups in EU for over 10 years and there were only a handful that had issues with regulation, but 95% had issues with a language/country lock in.
You missed the per-capita examples of Israel and Singapore. If either had the population of Germany or even that of Spain, they'd have more unicorns than the entire EU.
It's not striking that the EU is as wealthy per-person as it is and has so few tech unicorns. It's also not striking for a region with hundreds of millions of people. What's striking is that despite being wealthy and populous, the region hasn't done too well with tech.
I'd say that it's even changed during my own lifetime. There was a time when German cars had a much larger market share and Nokia was a dominant phone company. Nokia failed the transition into the smartphone era and while German cars are still great, their market share in EVs is much, much smaller. And it's not like there's a lack of talent. Plenty of Europeans are building huge tech companies, but a large fraction are choosing to do so in the US or other similar markets, like Canada (e.g., Shopify).
GDP always gets trotted out as if it is a holy grail and a benchmark for social welfare, which it isn't so think of it as a (failed) preemptive strike against getting a longer comment thread.
And so have Eindhoven (ASML), London (Revolut, Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo), Paris (DailyMotion, AppGratis), Berlin (Soundcloud, Mister Spex, Zalando, Helpling, Delivery Hero, Home24 and HelloFresh) and Amsterdam (Sonos (ok, technically Hilversum), Booking.com, TomTom) etc, etc. So what?
Tech companies exist the world over. The specific kind of tech company that requires a mountain of free cash and that can monopolize a whole segment is a SV anomaly and Microsoft is the exception simply because of when it started.
Those are actually tiny compared to most US tech companies with a global reach. The issue is that here in Europe everyone speaks their own language, and it's not feasible to advertise your tech stuff to the entire continent. There's no TV channels here where you can reach 300M people with a single commercial in a single language.
It's also an issue with capital. Everyone was shocked when Mistral raised what, 300M dollars? Ask on the street if anyone's heard of Mistral, and then ask about ChatGPT.
Meanwhile effing xAI from Elon, that no one really cares about is looking to raise $1B.
Here in Europe we're sadly not on the same level. Available capital is smaller. Reach is smaller (in practice but not in theory). Profit margins are smaller. Regulation is higher.
In 2023 you need extreme luck to create something in Europe that reaches a global audience to the point it's not worth trying. Just go for your local domestic market instead.
> Those are actually tiny compared to most US tech companies with a global reach
What are you talking about? Booking is 5.3B revenue, 112B market cap. Adyen is 37B market cap. These are not "tiny" companies compared to public tech companies in the US, and there are more than just these two.
Sure, Europe doesn't have as many frothy VC's and associated tech companies with insane valuations as the US. But it's not trailing out in last place like some of these comments make it out to be.
People need to look at actual facts and numbers before regurgitating the same old memes about how terrible Europe and the EU are.
"We committed to meet all the regulation in each country we're operating in. Our teams are working on it. In the meantime we'll start in our domestic market, because obviously if there has to be a first country to open it would be our origin country, right?"
They could create a separate limited liability legal entity that is a full subsidiary of Google. That subsidiary could license the technology or platform from the parent company and they'd be able to launch worldwide.
There must be mountains of legal concerns which vary by jurisdiction. Both in terms of copyright / right of authorship as well as GDPR/data protection.
Litigation is probably inescapable. I'm sure they want to be on solid footing.
Launching anything as a big tech company in Europe is an absolute nightmare. Between GDPR, DSA, DMA and in Google's case, several EC remedies, it takes months to years to get anything launched.
While that's usually my line too, in this case it's also a nightmare if you're selling access to an AI and it unexpectedly starts barfing up EU citizens' private data verbatim that 'somehow' ended up in the training set.
It's a nightmare for anyone that isn't a tiny startup that flies under the radar. See: shocking lack of global-scale innovative companies made in Europe.
Language barriers and local markets. 95% startups here build things for local markets and fail to scale to the global ones. In the meantime US startups scale to ~1bn people almost instantly.
That and the labor laws and very strict compared to the US. We have an office in Poland due to regulations most "employees" want to be contractors, this is due to a tax advantage / national healthcare I think. That said the offices in the US don't say it out loud, but in the EU seem to take a week off every other month for something.
At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.
Being contractors is Poland - that’s because of the taxes exactly, not regulations per se.
Contractors get taxed 19% flat rate and a small% for health insurance (even less in IT - 9%?). Whereas full time workers get taxed similarly to people in the west.
Yeah having privacy protections for everyone really hurts us… Someone releases something shiny so we should just allow them to harvest personal data and manipulate markets so we get access to it… not really a society I think most giants want to live in. I prefer waiting a bit but knowing that Google needs to play on a bit more even field over here. Plus none of the GDPR or DMA are that bad. Just make sure you comply and get it over with. It’s not that hard to build a privacy centric product that doesn’t steal my data.
On 2 yeah it does. Seems like the UK keeps falling behind on everything now that it lives in the shadow of the continent and can’t seem to create any value and nobody cares about that market. So much for the MaSiVe TraDe DeALZ we were getting unlocked…
> Just make sure you comply and get it over with. It’s not that hard to build a privacy centric product that doesn’t steal my data.
Eh, given that Europe struggles to build anything tech related, I'm going to say it's pretty hard. Far easier to make overpriced luxury handbags and the like.
Aside from, you know, most likely making the machines required to build the computer you're spewing the xenophobia on, and countless other examples that aren't making tech as simple as websites.
The anti-European gloating on HN is getting tiresome, and imho is a pretty big blind spot of HN moderation.
I think it's very exaggerated to call this xenophobia and suggest it needs to be moderated. OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury. This isn't xenophobic - it's true.
> I think it's very exaggerated to call this xenophobia
I'm also not quite sure it's xenophobia, but it's something other than calm and rational. Whenever Europe comes up in a HN thread, there's a sudden glut of snide comments and gloating, as if people are desperate for themselves and others to believe their layoffs-stricken industry is amazing nonetheless. Maybe to distract themselves from the mandatory RTO bad news?
Rather than calling it xenophobia, let me call it adversarial, and it's always the same side initiating it. Very, very tiresome.
I'm also willing to bet a very high % of the same demo would readily call HN an explicitly American forum and that inclusiveness or being welcoming to others shouldn't be a priority of the site, which I personally find just sort of jarring anywhere on the web, since https doesn't know borders and I grew up in the very overtly international FOSS community as an engineer. You know, where we make that Linux thing you probably have ten copies of on devices around you right now that started in Finland.
> OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury.
Only for a very narrow definition of "tech" that doesn't include the vast majority of engineering disciplines, as well as basic research and the education that enables the "tech".
I will take, for example, BioNTech over most startups posted on HN, and I'd rather we build another ITER than another Twitter clone.
Your bio says you're an R programmer. Are you aware the R foundation is a European (Austrian) org, like most organized open source? Seems those Europeans have quite a bit of time for tech after all.
A startup doesn't have the same target of its back as a large publicly traded corporation. It also has a different culture and is expected to take risks that non-startups aren't. In other words, not an apples-to-apples comparison.
> The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.
No, they can't. It's not an automated system that automagically fines companies if they get flooded by fake emails or whatever, they're pretty reasonable most of the time and you get given plenty of chances to work with regulators before they decide to fine you even a single euro (assuming you're guilty in the first place). Even if you get fined, they're usually scaled to the severity of the offense as well as the company's size.
Plus the solution is super simple, just don't invasively track your users without consent! I love that I can use the GDPR to tell my manager to fuck off when he talks about using some invasive tracking bullshit on our users, I'm glad it's there.
I'm not sure if this[0] is the most up-to-date list (I've seen a number of these lists), but take a look yourself. Most of these fines are tiny, certainly not earth shattering for any company of any size with any stability.
And if your business can't survive the financial burden of complying with GDPR, then good. There's no reason for a small business to even be violating it in the first place, since we've had about a decade of forewarning at this point regarding these privacy laws.
