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Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

>We need to wake the fuck up in the EU and start aggressively building European-based competitors

Good luck with that. Europe doesn't provide the environment (neither culturally nor financially) needed for these types of companies to arise.

And if you want 'state planned' tech companies: What happened to the EU funded Google-killer again?

If Europe doesn't reform itself and makes it less punishing for people to start, grow, fail, start again businesses then Europe will be left behind.

And tbh. I don't believe Europe can reform. Because the problems are so deeply entrenched in European societies that it would take a herculean effort to change things. Something no one is willing to do.

So all we have left is old money industry. But that won't keep up as alive for ever...

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I really abhor this recent escalation, and hope this will be a transient phenomenon.

But if things came to the worse, the EU would just have to emulate China.

China seems to manage just fine without Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon. Make life difficult for foreign competitors, and let the internal market take care of the rest. No need for a top down approach.

The thing is that most internet companies are big due to network effects, not because the underlying technology is hard to replicate. Ban Facebook in the EU, and we would have a new version in a few months. Ditto for Twitter. Google is a bit more challenging, but it would be possible to get a 'goodish' clone going in a short while.

(The same would not be the case for Intel, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Altera, etc... These companies do have something that is hard to replicate, and goes beyond network effects).

> Good luck with that. Europe doesn't provide the environment (neither culturally nor financially) needed for these types of companies to arise.

I think a large part of the success of US tech companies is the large size of the domestic market[1], which means startups can reach new customers much more easily to who speak the same language, use the same currency and so on. For example, if you want to do business in let's say the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, you have to deal with the British pound, the Euro, the Swedish Krona, the Danish Krone and the Norwegian Krone, and have staff who can speak English, German, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Not to mention the different laws and customs in each country. There are less exit opportunities partially because (for example) a German company flush with cash is less likely to be aware of some Swedish company that is growing like a rocket and would make a good acquisition target (made up example). Whereas in the US, many professionals are likely reading the same news and tech sources, will speak the same language as the company they are looking at acquiring and use the same currency. Not to mention if a startup captures 1% of the market in Sweden or wherever, it's a much smaller userbase than 1% of the US market.

[1] Point number 8 in PG's excellent essay on the topic: http://paulgraham.com/america.html (I would argue that points 8 and 9 are most relevant.)

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