Which economy has better prospects in the long run? Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve.
Surely you see the contradiction there.
> Currently internet is very U.S. centric because most of the big players are located there. That could change if [...]
That's not just a coincidence and I don't believe it's any kind of first-mover advantage. It's about the environment in which you operate and passing more and more laws and rules, regardless of the intentions, is the opposite direction. One can lament the digital lawlessness, but we can't pretend it didn't have value or that tailored laws could have a similar effect.
One possibility, of course, is that larger companies will have more resources to tackle GDPR compliance, and thus be better able to respond effectively than small companies. However, it's also possible that, by taking privacy / security seriously from day one and storing the minimal set of user data needed to operate, a smaller company will have a distinct advantage over some BigCo that must now migrate sprawling, inter-tangled distributed systems never designed for GDPR compliance. After all, that small company now has a compelling legal reason to avoid feature / data warehousing bloat and save their limited engineering resources, whereas the larger company most certainly has that bloat baked deeply into their stack due to years and years of "Big Data" hype.
It's not too early to claim that the risks are disproportionate. Those of us with small companies really just count on subjective enforcement. Sadly, it seems everyone says "do nothing wrong, nothing to worry about" with these kinds of laws and don't understand risk management or the cost of conformance.
Launching a new product / service does not give a company carte blanche to do whatever they like, no matter what Uber et al. may prefer to believe. Suppose I want to create a "gun-share" app, because, you know, sharing economy and stuff. I should fully expect that, where laws exist that make this infeasible (e.g. background checks, transfer of ownership laws, etc.), those laws will be enforced. I should also fully expect that those laws might change.
If I've been paying attention to the broader world - something that Silicon Valley isn't historically that great at - I should probably have seen this coming for years, since that's how long it takes to build support for legislation. GDPR didn't come out of nowhere; data privacy, security, and ownership concerns have been building for a while now.
In the case of the GDPR: my personal position is that it gives EU citizens rights we should all have had from the start with respect to our data. Good on them for passing it, and for giving it teeth. If that tramples on some service that can't be bothered to respect those rights, I couldn't care less - and I say this as a small business owner who's fully aware that, yes, someday I too may face a GDPR compliance request. Maybe I'll be prepared, maybe I won't, maybe it'll never happen; that's part of doing business.
You're presenting the situation as a failure of the EU, but I think you've missed the point here. The big players are located in the US because the environment there rewards big players and has a general snowball effect. The EU system rewards small-player innovation and limits the creation of very large, dominant, monopolistic big players. This should be a net benefit to the overall system, if it weren't fot big players just coming in from elsewhere. Unfortunately, due to the global nature of the web, this leads to less-regulated US big players dominating the EU players. Solving that is tough, but the fact GDPR applies to US companies is an interesting start.
I disagree. Do you believe this is the case today or is it the goal? From what I understand, the gap is quite large between number of small companies based on environment. Many of us with smaller companies stand on the shoulder of giants. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can mean the financial incentive to become large spurs those of us who are small. Artificial ceilings, however altruistic people tell themselves they are by limiting the big, bad, scary companies, often are just a low tide lowering all boats in a trickle-down way.
You're right, but what I was saying is that I believe it is the case today in the EU to a far greater extent than in it is in the US. That's not saying in any way that the EU is close to an ideal situation, or that there aren't big, dominant EU players. Along with the case of the influence of big non-EU players skewing the environment to a large degree.
Example: http://www.three.co.uk/go-binge
Also, GDPR applies to companies of all size - which can hurts small companies more than bigger ones.
My point was not that they would be about the same thing. My point is that GDPR is pretty clearly about the rights of the little guy. Lack of net neutrality is clearly about the rights of big businesses. Neither alone does not seem to do that much good or harm. But if those attitudes are permanent in the legislating systems, that will have an effect.
So do you believe companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are going hire the best people, make the best money and offer the best content? It could be. Or there could be something disruptive. Where is that disruptive going to happen?
if European legislation is more supportive for small agile companies to evolve
GDPR is great, but it seems to me many of the Congresswomen/men were questioning how would legislation impact the ability of US tech companies to remain agile. I do not think we have such pro-business forces in the EU. That's why we are so far behind US and China in tech. I fear more and more legislation will make us less likely to have small agile companies.
No need to get infected by American exceptionalism. The UK Parliament Select Committee asked Zuckerberg in for questioning over this, and he would have received a comparable grilling. Zuck refused to go.
It's easy to found a company and pay a fair flat rate percentage tax rate as eu (or schengen for this topic) citizen. It's just not economical to stay here once you get big tho.
The US definitely has its problems, but as long as there's still an ISP in the Valley who upholds Net Neutrality, development is still probably going to happen there.
Asia will replace it, if anything.