Czech Republic proposes the highest digital tax rate in Europe

I wholeheartedly disagree. There has been a huge active community rigorously battling Microsoft's dominance offering alternative technologies and innovations. They deserve all the credit for maintaining the balance. Not government.

> And how did the market forces punish Facebook for the colossal fuck-ups?

Facebook has become less and less popular in recent years. Exactly because people got concerned with those colossal fuck-ups. So you see Facebook on the fence of those things and trying to improve their company ethics.

> Saying that market forces punish predatory attitudes is beyond the pale. It's gaslighting and ignorance rolled into one.

This is perhaps the popular opinion in Europe. Do you completely deny the existence of corrective forces? It seems to me a the US is doing a far better job at embracing them and has a lot of its innovative success to thank for it.

Let's not forget that tech giants often don't pay any taxes to eu countries. Like zero. This is real problem for system based around taxes. It also puts smaller players that have to pay at disadvantage.

This is just way how to tax the giants. I thin soon this is going to be normal and probably even higher.

I think you are underestimating the language and cultural barriers inside Europe. When I still lived in the Netherlands (my native country) we got a British employee at some point. Everyone in the company spoke English reasonably well, but not quite fluently. So what happened was that lunch conversations started out in English but quickly evolved to Dutch. I felt bad about it, but it was just so much easier to joke around in Dutch.

This also mirrors the experience of my British ex-girlfriend, who lived and worked in the Netherlands.

After this I lived in the UK for two years while working remote for an Irish company, and it took me a while to truly communicate efficiently with native English speakers. I knew the grammar and vocabulary, it just wasn't always obvious how to use it. People have made entire charts about miscommunications[1]. I also wrote a bit about this elsewhere[2].

It's one thing to argue in English on HN or watch Star Trek, but quite another to actually work in English every day. Perhaps it might actually be easier is everyone is a non-native speaker, but then you quickly run in to the "large group of natives speaking their own language"-problem I described before.

In addition, actually living in a foreign country is also a bit harder if you don't speak the language.

Either way, the barrier is certainly higher than in the US or China, where everyone just speaks the same language.

[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0jvF8NIMAAFIn6.png:large and https://merican.vickihollett.com/wp-content/upLoads/anglo-du...

[2]: https://lobste.rs/s/xnjo8g/add_downvote_reason_unkind#c_imbo...

> too much focus on welfare and government control at the cost of free market and innovation. Too much "system thinking" as opposed to creative engineering. This used to be different a couple of decades ago.

Wasn't there much more welfare several decades ago? This certainly seems the case in my own country of the Netherlands, and it was also true in the UK (until Tatcher came in). I can't speak to other countries.

I'm not convinced these things are strongly correlated to creativity or innovation. It seems to me that the primary reason people create things is because humans are just creative; it's part of our nature. Certainly if I look at my own motivations the amount of money going to the taxman is pretty far down the list of why I do things.

Additionally, not everything is about economics. I have some amount of sympathy for libertarianism/free market thinking, but too often does everything get reduced to merely an economical argument. The world is more than just economics. In Germany they've been having a large debate about the ethics of driverless cars, for example, whereas in the US they've just put the cars on the road without first having a public debate. It may be more "innovative", but is it also the right thing to do?

First Amazon launched their online book store. Then Microsoft made a $150 million investment into Apple. Then Google launched its search innovation. Linux and Apache were already hugely successful with dominating the web. Java and PHP were kicking ASP's ass.

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2019/04/22/april-2019-web...

Microsoft got so much distracted by certain market dominance they totally missed the uprising of the web players. Then Valve released their app store, Apple released the iPhone including its app store, Google released Android and Microsoft saw its dominance fall apart. The settlement didn't contribute to any of these developments.

So what happened is - because Microsoft was so dominant - the competition needed to seriously up their innovative game to conquer their positions. If government would have intervened more strongly there wouldn't have been the need for stronger competition which would have resulted in less innovation. The market corrected itself.