Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

>During the last two decades, Europe already failed to take part in building the internet. Now Europeans all use US services. Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, AirBnB, Uber...

Not all services popular in Europe are US-based. Asos, Zalando, Flixbus, Klarna, Xing, Spotify, Auto1, Takeaway.com are just some of the big names, that lots of people in Europe are using on daily basis. Here in Berlin there are lots of startups with quite interesting and fresh ideas. Very few of them will be impacted by the (terrible) new law: the web of information we might have already lost, but the web of services will prosper and grow much bigger than it is now.

View on HN

As a single European datapoint: I know Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, AirBnB and used all of them except AirBnB. I never used any of Asos, Zalando, Flixbus, Klarna, Xing, Spotify, Auto1. I know Flixbus and Spotify. I probably heard about Zalando. Asos, Xing, Klarna, Auto1 are totally new to me. I googled them and actually I knew Xing and forgot it, it's hard to compete with LinkedIn. Klarna moved to Columbus, Ohio.

I'm not surprised people on HN don't know popular fashion brands or German used-car matketplaces, but if you are not sure they are big, check their revenues. Zalando is bigger than AirBnB or Instagram, Auto1 and Asos earn more than Dropbox. Brand recognition is not the only sign of success.

ASOS is my Amazon for cheap fashion. I've heard of Zalando (and have used them once) but they sort of compete for the same audience, and I just gravitate to what I'm used to.

I don't think Google could've been built in Europe, but as a European I certainly would love more European products in tech: one advantage is that Europeans think in localisation by default, and some American products start our being very USA centric.

Yandex is quite successful despite not being American, so a local search engine business in Western Europe would not be impossible (www and mp3 are European inventions, so could be the PageRank algorithm). Europe is more open to competition and American rivals usually have much more money for a blitzkrieg. It's more like competition of financial markets, than technology or business model.

Klarna Inc. is a subsidiary. The parent company is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.

Asos, Zalando, Flixbus, Klarna, Xing, Spotify, Auto1, Takeaway.com

I'm not from Europe or America and the only one I've heard of is 'spotify'.

Are you really denying that the EU is well behind the US in terms of software though? I mean that's immediately obvious to any casual observer. Not sure why people are so defensive about it.

European IT industry is certainly behind in terms of scale and penetration of global markets (the reasons are explained here in other comments, including fragmentation of the EU market and harder access to VC money), but I don't think it is behind in software engineering (especially considering numerous offices of American giants and EU aquisitions like Skype) and European companies can easily dominate on the local markets. All mentioned companies are quite successful and visible in EU (e.g. check the revenue of Zalando). And of course there are many other, classic software companies like SAP, TomTom, HERE etc.

I suppose the counter to these moronic laws that make Brexit look like a great decision would be some new form of copyright like CC. We could in theory slap these on all community created content. My guess would be that this sort of information would be of much higher volume (and quality) than much of the commercial nonsense.

The only way to counter these laws is to repeal them - there's no workaround. Basically, some big corp like A.S. will use this law to require filtering of their "protected" news publications, and since the only way to filter the content is to match it against the latest publications, and it's quite unlikely that a 3rd party provider will be ever able to implement such filter, everyone will be forced to buy the filter from A.S. And from other publishers, of course. This new source of revenue (or, better say, rent) could be one of the reasons for lobbying this law.

With the exception of Spotify, none of those services you name are "big" in Europe. And we use those services on a US or South Korean device. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com