71–80 of 187 posts
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That's not copyright. You can still enforce a licence on the data you provide. E.g. Exchanges do this all the time with market price data.
Sure, you can make licenses, but if someone gets a copy outside of the licensed channel, you have no recourse.
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There was an easy solution for Yelp: opt out of Google search results. What Yelp wants, is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to benefit from what Google offers, and they want Google to behave exactly as they would prefer, assuming control over Google's product through government power. Classic competitor hypocrisy, the same behavior displayed 15 years ago by Microsoft's extremely envious competition. They…
If search results that hit Yelp data linked to Yelp there'd be no problem. However if it links to Google Places because Google scraped the Yelp data and loaded it into the Places database - that's a problem. Suppose someone launched an 'Encyclopedia Search' service that searched Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britanica, etc and linked to their sites. The the service then started loading the Wikipedia and Britanica content i…
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Just out of curiosity why do you need to register a company in every country (assuming you are US based since there is no sales tax in the EU anywhere ;) ). I haven't done it but isn't the thing with the new VAT regulations that you can pay your taxes to one revenue service (and just register with one) and they will divide it according to your sales data (e.g. the customers country)? Or do you mean that you have to p…
>I haven't done it but isn't the thing with the new VAT regulations that you can pay your taxes to one revenue service (and just register with one) and they will divide it according to your sales data I think that only works if you have limited business, but I'm not sure. I believe the problem is that we're in a country with 25% VAT, but if we want to charge our German customer only 19%, we need to do that via a Germ…
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You can't kick out the Americans without assuming dictatorship-like command powers over the entire EU economic zone. That only functions at all in China - to whatever mediocre extent it is functioning today - because that's a unified market, one country, under one leadership. Any attempt by Europe to try that, would destroy the European economy. Germany is hyper dependent on exports. The US eats most of its own dog f…
> Kick the Americans out? Ok, well now BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes are banned in the US. Germany just lost a huge part of its economy (look up the two biggest markets for their vehicles: the US and China). As someone living in a German city which is a world leading car manufacturing center, I would actually like to see the end of German auto industry. The whole German economic system is geared towards those big car ma…
I am not even sure, that Silicon Valley is ahead when it comes to "digital stuff" inside cars. It is my perception at least, that companies like Mercedes or BMW had many of the digital helpers first. I therefor think Germany would be a great place to start a tech-startup apart from the next social network.
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Short term expense of the citizens. Nurturing local business is a long term benefit strategy. Protectionism is how every nation on the planet developed. Why are Americans driving South Korean/Japanese cars and not the other way around? Because the south koreans and the japanese imposed large tariffs on car imports and the US did not. Their car companies had free range on their own turf. Which gave them time and money…
The US practices a huge amount of protectionism as well. The reason that the Americans are driving Japanese cars is that they were built in the US (which happens because of the protectionism). Ford doesn't build cars in Japan. The end result is good for most people (consumers get more choice, jobs are still in the country).
If you look at what has happened in China after Google left, how they were able to quickly grow massive web companies, protectionism seems like a no-brainer for every slightly advanced country. Silicon Valley sees the huge first-mover advantages and is moving as fast as possible to move into every liberalized market. But it makes no sense for a country to allow Silicon Valley to take these industries for themselves.…
You can't kick out the Americans without assuming dictatorship-like command powers over the entire EU economic zone. That only functions at all in China - to whatever mediocre extent it is functioning today - because that's a unified market, one country, under one leadership. Any attempt by Europe to try that, would destroy the European economy. Germany is hyper dependent on exports. The US eats most of its own dog f…
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As long as the price / performance is not totally off, I'd always rather pay a bit more for a slightly worse service if I know VAT money will stay in my city, tax will be paid in my state, salaries would be paid in the same job market where I am, and the profit would be invested in my neighborhood. Nobody prevents you from buying local right now, so that's a red herring. If you want to force others to do the same, yo…
This leads to nowhere. I could reply: And you pay for the locally laid off people and support the community which now fails necessary means?
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> How? Great firewall of Europe? Or what exactly are you proposing? Forcing them to follow basic rules of fairness is usually enough to keep them out.
"Basic rules of fairness" is meaningless crap that roughly translates to, "we aren't as good so we will keep passing regulations in favor of locals until it's insane for anyone else to try." Frankly, it wouldn't be that surprising if net neutrality started getting violated in Europe by protectionism laws.
However, if we granted more fairness to the companies, we wouldn't have more or better companies. We'd just be invaded by huge US companies, because they're just better and move faster. So, yes, we have to start with smaller actors who just rely on the openness of the markets of dominant actors: We couldn't build Apple but we rely on their Appstore to have fair rules, we couldn't build Amazon EC2 but our companies rely on the openness of the EC2 service, we couldn't build Windows but we rely on Microsoft publishing its API. And this API documentation is exactly the subject of the $2bn fine that Microsoft received from EU in 2003.
I'm sorry, perhaps US performs too well, but we need open APIs in Europe. From the fines I've seen, the decisions aren't generic protectionism, they're focused on keeping free market so we can have some local startups too.
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> kick out the Americans How? Great firewall of Europe? Or what exactly are you proposing?
> How? Great firewall of Europe? Or what exactly are you proposing? Forcing them to follow basic rules of fairness is usually enough to keep them out.
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There were many search companies in the start and for a long time all of them did the same, google came and delivered a better product and kept innovation. People came and saw the google homesite with a logo, textfield and a button. This is simple we can make this also without knowing all the stuff behind it. Search is now a mature industry, it is always better to go for the new places where there are no dominant pla…
I agree that protectionism is normally bad, but the reason that it is bad is that it suppresses competition most of the time. If guelo's argument that Google not being in China fostered more tech companies in China is correct, then removing an initially dominant foreign company with big first mover advantage and economies of scale can actually increase competition in the market. That said, once the home grown compani…