Why big tech should fear Europe

The Copyright directive in particular - we Europeans often found some comfort in the fact that corporate lobbies don't have nearly as much power in the EU as they do in the US. Sadly, if that directive passes, we won't even have that.

Additionally, many of these internet companies are formed from the ashes and exiles of older companies in the US. Valve is founded by former Microsoft employees, Google got Jeff Dean and Sanjay from DEC, etc.

Also, a bunch of money flows from investors who profited off early internet companies in the US, such as the Paypal mafia and Netscape. Investors who want their startups nearby.

Without top quality developers, you're not going to have a top internet company.

• The culture of incentivising employees with equity stakes is mostly a US thing. It's not widely practiced outside the USA. ARM is a rare example of a British tech firm that gave out equity to early employees, and not coincidentally, ARM was (up until it got bought by the Japanese) one of Europe's tech success stories.

• Lack of a comparable venture capital ecosystem of the type that came out of the success of Silicon Valley.

• The EU single market is (a) relatively new and (b) overhyped. It's still much easier to sell across state lines in the USA than it is to sell to the EU market, for all kinds of reasons. Of course the single market made it a lot easier but still not as easy as when there's a single language, a well established federal-level trading code that's been around hundreds of years etc.

• During the time the big US tech firms were establishing themselves and taking off (the 1980s), Europe was riven with hard socialism and even dictatorships. Spain was a dictatorship up until 1982, and they then elected socialists. France has famously strict labor laws that make it extremely risky and hard to try and grow a startup (which is already risky and hard). Italy was bogged down from the 70s-90s and arguably still today by heavily broken interventionist labour market, and terrorism/political instability. Germany didn't liberalise its labour markets to something approximating US standards until the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s and of course was split in two with one half being another dictatorship until 1991. During the 1980s the UK was busy recovering from a near-fatal economic meltdown caused by confrontations with hard left unions, that had rotating power cuts, three day weeks, garbage piling up on streets and an IMF bailout. Thatcher spent the whole of the 80s trying to bring the UK back to western liberal standards of growth and prosperity, so it wasn't an environment conducive to making a Microsoft or an Apple.

So it's a combination of US style VC fuelled tech ecosystems taking decades to grow, lack of equity-based incentives, most of Europe not having had sufficient political stability during the time companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel etc were becoming established, and large parts of Europe even today still having radically more socialist governments and economies than the USA with the concomitant difficulty of growing any kind of startup at all, let alone high risk/high reward tech startups.

Berlin may have comparable salaries (for me it was actually better, but that was probably specific circumstances), but cost of living is dramatically lower and quality of life dramatically better.

What if we swap the chicken with the egg in that argument:

Maybe UK engineers aren't paid as much as US engineers because UK companies aren't nearly as profitable as US ones?

Another way to phrase that is that UK engineers, in the UK, don't produce as much value as UK engineers do in the US, which is why it makes sense for them to move.

I just hope that this time the EU won't let the government waste taxpayer money.

As a person running a small business, I don't see these motions by the EU as "sticking up for the little guy" or looking out for local businesses. I see them as just more things to think about as I try to keep my business running and growing.

Furthermore, I see a lot of talk about tax and fairness. I don't see a lot of talk about how that money is spent or what the benefits of running a European company are.

I don't know, but this problem easily generalizes _all_ giant corporations.

For example, there is still no iTunes store in my country or Amazon Prime delivery. I can't even sell apps on the Google Play store because my country is not supported. And those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.

I definitely agree and this is my main point: If Google or others have to fundamentally restructure their business model, or the cost of keeping up with the regulations outweighs the potential upside (and here cost includes all metrics: real cost, opportunity cost), then they will most definitely back out, scale down, offer a reduced service, or worst of all, charge for their software! -- gasp!

That sounds a lot like an internet blockade...and blockades are acts of war:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/blockade-warfare

I'm sure the US Government would have something to say to companies that decided to wage a kind of private war on allied nations.

[1] https://www.rt.com/news/366642-spain-meme-ban-backlash/

Edit: spelling

These scores would be completely arbitrary, but you should be able to imagine the outcry if it became public that Google set the score for removal to 1000, but if they had set it 5000 would have blocked 5 times more copyrighted material. The public/politicians wouldn't understand these numbers are both made up (and so any difference between them is really meaningless), and would lead to more blocking of legal material.

This isn't actually true.

We don't sell data, We make things which we sell to people.

GDPR was a pain in that it was work we didn't previously have to do but it wasn't hard to comply with.

FWIW I'm completely in favour of it as well, it's about damn time.