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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Oversight and pragmatism. You have to start somewhere - and it's usually quite sensible to start with the biggest market, and then expand to the smaller ones.

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Absolutely.

But a company the size of AOL surely can't make the excuse that they have to start somewhere. According to internetworldstats North America is only 18% of the global market. Even Europe is bigger with 26%.

Sourse: (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)

There are also liability issues. This service is offered to US citizens only, possibly because their billing practices don't conform to laws of other nations. Localization of legal issues is costly and time consuming. If you examine the member agreement linked on that page, you see the following:

3. QUALIFICATIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP

To use the AOL Services, you must be a U.S. resident and legally able to enter into contracts. AOL reserves the right to limit you to one free trial or promotion of a paid subscription plan that cannot be combined with other offers.

Well if startups from small European countries can deal with that, the I'm sure large American companies can as well. If they choose to do so of course.

They can, for sure, and many of them do (just not all of them). It's a decision based on the cost of legal vs. the income benefit of providing services to the international market.

AOL has apparently decided the US is its target market. You can get better free web mail from other sites, anyway. :)

he he, yes absolutely...

My point is not to downgrade American companies, it's more that I'm perplexed why some of them are content with such a small share of the global market. If an European startup can do it, then it seems like it is not an issue of it being too hard or too expensive.

Everyone wants to sue the billion dollar company, no one will bother suing the broke, gone-tomorrow startup.

Marketing in the US:

"Ebooks for sale." If you live in the same state as our office, pay sales tax, otherwise tax free.

Marketing in the EU:

"Ebooks for sale."

Possibly illegal in France (do laws against free shipping apply to ebooks?).

Some ebooks are not legal in some states, e.g. nazi-related books in Germany.

Maybe I forgot a few other problems. Time to hire 27 lawyers to find out.

So you're saying that America is a bigger market than the world?

swombat probably meant that America is the biggest single market in the world (measured in purchasing power, not number of people). Even if that isn't strictly true (I'm not sure if, say, China is actually bigger), America is surely the largest accessible market for most American startups.

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