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Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

foreignpolicy.com

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Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#51

Post by aranelsurion »

jeremyjh wrote: post #41
aranelsurion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this article. Title is "Europe Is in Danger of Regulating Its Tech Market Out of Existence". But then the subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing *global firms* to leave." (emphasis mine) Then you see a picture of an Apple Vision Pro. I've only skimmed through the article and there are 11 mentions of Apple and 12 mentions of Meta, then some mentions of X and such. These aren't even "global" firms,…

You seem to have confused "tech market" with "tech industry".

IDK, are local products and products from elsewhere other than US are not meant when one says "european tech market"?

The title says the market is in danger of going out of existence, and the article solely mentions a handful of big US companies AFAICT.

Or maybe it's a dig at Europe for having large parts of its market dominated by US companies, and I'm missing that.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#52

Post by chmod775 »

threeseed wrote: post #48
chmod775 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just counting on others being too exhausted to bring yet another moot argument to its predetermined conclusion? I'll finish it to save everyone some time: A: how much of gdp is facilitated through the search abilities of meta and google, though? B: It doesn't matter. A: Why not? B: There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules fulfilling the same function in their place, just like in ma…

> There will be someone else who is willing to play by the local rules Building a competitive search engine or AI model requires VC investment. It's simply too expensive to do otherwise. VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.

> Building a competitive search engine [..] requires VC investment.

> VC investment requires a vibrant startup ecosystem, well crafted regulations and a risk-tolerant culture.

Yandex, Baidu, and many other lesser-known local-only search engines exist. There's also nothing stopping an already existing technology company from entering search. The statement is incorrect.

Meanwhile common sense tells us that obviously there's going to be investment into domestic search engines if Google voluntarily throws in the towel. Europe is a huge place and there's a lot of money to be made, even if it's merely with context-based advertising and no individual tracking.

> Building a competitive [..] AI model requires VC investment [..] and a risk-tolerant culture.

Training a large model anyways, since nobody has really figured out how to recoup that investment yet. Why are you trying to derail this from talking about search though?

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#54

Post by phendrenad2 »

Nah, not really. The EU will have a thriving tech market. It just won't have ad-supported sites. Because if anyone hasn't noticed, "data privacy" is just targeted ads.

"This company was caught tracking which users visited each page" Yes, for targeted ads.

"Cambridge Analytica was" Yes, for targeted ads.

"3rd party" Yes, targeted ads.

It's all targeted ads. They want to serve you targeted ads. Any attempt to paint "data privacy" as something other than this is irresponsible fearmongering.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#55

Post by zug_zug »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #47
zug_zug wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true though? Are there any 5-person startups with < 10k users getting sued/shutdown by this regulation?

That data point is very hard to provide any evidence for, and not sufficient to draw any conclusions from. For example, what if the company was never started? What if they pivoted after speaking to a lawyer?

Frankly I'm not very convinced by that -- it seems that most social networks are already killed by winner-takes-all SV companies buying-out any possible threat.

The situation in America is an absolute nightmare with data being sold through all sorts of mechanisms with zero oversight (your ISP, your car, most apps on your phone, whoever does your credit scores) -- I'm sure there's some way to make successful tech that isn't the hellscape America has.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#56

Post by self_awareness »

radley wrote: post #15
DataDaemon wrote: post #6

Europe is a place to take social benefits; there is no tech, no innovation. It's better to sit on the couch and watch Netflix than start a business. There is too much risk, too many taxes, and too many regulations.

Spotify benefitted from starting in the EU.

That's why there is low risk for them to compete with anyone who didn't get EU funds. Even if the tech is better.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#57

Post by Vinnl »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #17

The real problem is that the requirements for a social platform are getting very onerous, to the point that it takes at least several engineers working full time on the problem. That really hurts a startup's ability to initially launch in the market, especially one with less VC money. (Certain BigCo new products can be thought of as a startup too, with limited budgets.) This doesn't just affect social media companies…

Which regulations are you referring to? Do those not apply just to those that have managed to obtain a dominant role, ie not startups entering the market?

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#59

Post by dang »

TekMol wrote: post #40

I think it already did. I am an avid reader of Show HNs. And I remember many that became successful businesses. But not a single European one. All the "startups" that I see here in Europe are very classical businesses. They build software tools for local enterprises. It seems nobody in Europe is building something for the open web. Maybe because nobody here understands all the regulations that come with it. The GDPR…

I've noticed that European Show HNs tend to be open-source projects rather than startups. Not interpreting, just noticing.

Re: Europe is in danger of regulating its tech market out of existence

#60

Post by Vinnl »

aranelsurion wrote: post #33
kredd wrote: post #10

I might be talking out of my depth, as I don’t live in Europe, but I’ve heard the same paraphrased headlines like these since at least 2016. Has status quo been swayed one way or another since then? Theoretically speaking, wouldn’t legislating away the top US players open the market to the local companies a la Naver in SK, WeChat in China or Line in Japan? I understand I’m dumbing it down, but assuming such legislati…

I don't get this article. Title is "Europe Is in Danger of Regulating Its Tech Market Out of Existence". But then the subtitle says "Poorly designed laws are forcing *global firms* to leave." (emphasis mine) Then you see a picture of an Apple Vision Pro. I've only skimmed through the article and there are 11 mentions of Apple and 12 mentions of Meta, then some mentions of X and such. These aren't even "global" firms,…

It seems to hinge on extrapolating from Apple not doing AI in the EU that NVidia might leave the market, harming Mistral.
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