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Comment by erklik | Hacker News Reader

From a non-developed world viewpoint, is it even possible for China/India etc to have there companies grow to such a massive size to rival Facebook, Micrisoft etc without protecting them from multi-nationals with way more immense power and the capacity to simply buy companies?

Ala, Facebook bought Instagram. If there was no such restriction, could they not have just bought Tencent in its infancy?

Essentially ensuring that currently countries that have not developed will continually never develop.

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Just look at the EU and you have your answer about protecting your young markets.

And the answer is that there’s nothing to rival Facebook, Google, etc. in Europe. Save for Yandex in Russia.

I think we'd all be better off in the long run if the EU did more to hobble American tech companies operating in the EU.

Well, all except shareholders of those companies.

Facebook and Google are bad.

We need something better. Hobbling them won’t achieve that.

Why do you think that? If those companies are hobbled, that will give any EU competitor to them some breathing room.

Yeah - I’m aware of this way of thinking.

If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that.

If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.

If you hobble them through protectionism, you create a vacuum which will be filled by a clone.

The clone will then have the same incentives to preserve the status quo as Google and Facebook are doing, just with different ownership.

The only way to replace Google and Facebook with something better is to identify and invest in something better - I.e. something that offers value that they can’t.

I do believe that government investment, can help with this.

I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.

> If the goal is to simply clone google or Facebook in Europe for reasons of politics then I agree - hobbling them would facilitate that. If the goal is to actually produce something better, I think the opposite is true.

I think the result would be inherently "actually" superior by virtue of being under the thumb of EU regulation to a degree that American corporations aren't. I'm not talking about technical superiority, which I don't care about. Having locally regulated technically inferior clones is preferable to the status quo.

> I also believe that consumer rights laws etc can help.

And such laws are best enforced against local companies, not foreign companies with foreign values. That's why it's a good idea for the EU to hobble, if not outright ban, American internet companies.

What laws do you think would make things better and which ones are not being enforced?

What kinds of regulation on social networking and or search would produce a better product?

I think an answer based on counter factuals was expected. Such as: if Faang salaries didn’t exert a global brain drain, if non US markets allowed competitors to Faang to exist, etc etc then the landscape would be different.

I find your answer rather shallow.

You're ignoring the fact of FB, Google et al opening offices all over Germany/EU and paying ludicrous salaries to even junior devs. It is a form of resource theft IMHO.

They have the deep coffers to lure young people who otherwise might've started their own businesses. As a result, the IT and developer market is entirely fucked up here in Southern Germany. Yes, yes, "software eating the World" and all that — but the big players (US corps, mostly) are not just by buying up most of the talent but _they create unhealty expectations for the rest of the crowd_.

_"I know where to put a semicolon in JS, I expect a starting salary of €100k"_ etc.

If they actually truly know where semicolons go in JS, then they may be worth €100k. That's some deep magic, which has bitten this very, very experienced developer in the ass more than once.

Getting it right in Java or C is no special feat. Getting it 100% correct in Javascript... that's an accomplishment.

a) You're acting as if no one earning a good salary saves up for taking risks later.

b) How entitled can you be to tell other people that it's fucked up not to risk it all to make a business where you please, or not to request salaries the industry is willing to pay. All in the name of... what? Nationalism?

From the other point of view of having worked for US software companies all my life, I think the developer market is fucked up in the rest of the world because talented developers are getting criminally underpaid.

Is not having an equivalent of Facebook or Google a bad thing?

It is when you are busy investigating those companies for being monopolies...

Do you have any examples?

There are no examples. Thats the point he is making.

There’s Zalando in Germany, which sees itself as rival to Amazon, but nowhere as big. And I think it’s safe to say there’s no substantial competition in social networks space. Even though Telegram is registered in London, Durov is playing by the US rules.

Zalando is only for clothes tho? Here in Belgium we have Coolblue and Bol that are decent alternatives to Amazon

Coolblue and Bol in the Netherlands as well. Amazon doesn't really have a big market share here.

Bol is also owned by Ahold (Albert Heijn). Which to be fair to them, is a pretty big technical powerhouse for this side of the pond. They've been developing self-checkout systems since the 80's.

The Netherlands used to have Hyves. Which was pretty big at the time. But it just died. After which everyone moved to Facebook.

Why should that be due to protectionism? There could be any number of reasons why the EU has so few large tech companies compared to the US. For example:

1. Costs on top of salary are more expensive in the EU (better worker's rights, more vacation, higher taxes)

2. EU has a more fragmented market than the US in terms of language, demographics, regulations, etc.

These don't necessarily apply to China or India.

And let’s not forget that free speech does not exist as a practical right in the EU—a site like Facebook would have to spend inordinate amounts of money on moderation not to get closed.

this is false, numerous EU countries have a similar rights, de juro or de facto. Exceptions and laws against hate speech do tend to be stronger.

The fact that you're making such a statement about "the EU" shows how misleading or ignorant you're being, since this is not governed by EU law for the most part.

I'd argue that most EU countries have stronger de facto rights, since peaceful protests in the capital don't tend to get beaten into submission like what happened in the Washington last june.

I think you might want to read about this:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yello...

What Europe considers "free speech" isn't the same as what America considers "free speech."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-s...

>On free speech, the U.S. and Europe have also gone different ways. The German minister of justice threatened Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google search back in December, telling them they needed to move faster and better to remove hateful posts that violate German law. Now the minister is proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat.

>To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable. Facebook and Twitter are private actors who could censor voluntarily under the Constitution -- indeed, their voluntary censorship would itself be protected speech.

>But the government can’t order private censorship any more than it can censor directly. That’s because U.S. constitutional tradition treats hate speech as the advocacy of racist or sexist ideas. They may be repellent, but because they count as ideas, they get full First Amendment protection.

You're missing the entire point. Germany has much less free speech yes, but it's an outlier (comes from post-WW2 laws preventing nazi speech and continued). Other EU countries have much, much less restrictions, some countries come close to the (extreme for the western world) free speech standards US has in law.

Europe and the EU are much more heterogeneous than the US. Making comparison on national laws for the EU with US is not even falsifiable, you can usually find countries on both sides. This does not apply to EU law like GDPR of course.

https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new

“The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Luxembourg (tied in 6th place), Finland and Germany (tied in 8th place), and Ireland”

6 out of the top 10 most free countries are in Europe according to this one index.

"2020 World Press Freedom Index" https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table

    1 Norway      0  7.84  7.84  0.02  0
    2 Finland     0  7.93  7.93  0.03  0
    3 Denmark     0  8.13  8.13 -1.74  2
    4 Sweden      0  9.25  9.25  0.94 -1
    5 Netherlands 0  9.96  9.96  1.33 -1
    6 Jamaica     0 10.51 10.51 -0.62  2
    7 Costa Rica  0 10.53 10.53 -1.71  3
    8 Switzerland 0 10.62 10.62  0.10 -2
    9 New Zealand 0 10.69 10.69 -0.06 -2
   10 Portugal    0 11.83 11.83 -0.80  2

7 out the top 10 most free countries in the world for press freedoms are in Europe.

edit: for those downvoting me for speaking the truth, why are you doing it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed on 4 November 1950, guarantees a broad range of human rights to inhabitants of member countries of the Council of Europe, which includes almost all European nations. These rights include Article 10, which entitles all citizens to free expression. Echoing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this provides that:

> Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include

> freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without

> interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall

> not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or

> cinema enterprises.

Off the top of my head, the Cato human freedom index isn't the same thing as "free speech" the OP mentioned, and while Europe I think strikes a balance very well its rights to guarantee its citizens a happy life, the US in particular is also known for having a kind of extreme position on free speech owing to the original constitution.

Google "freedom of speech in us vs europe" to see some of the differences.

These differences aren't common enough in day-to-day life to affect quality of life, but in certain controversial situations it leads to different laws being passed. I think that's what OP is getting at.

While it's true it's much more dangerous to have an opinion that is not not mainstream in America. I respect your free speech and it's idea very much but in practice people get their lives ruined easily. Getting fired for an example, but that might be related to workers rights.

This is ridiculous. Of course free speech exists as a right in the the EU. (I don't know what you want to express with the qualifier "practical". Rights are not practical, they are legal.)

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of expression.

The thing is, Europe was once relevant as far as tech goes, but European hostility toward disruptive innovation undermined all that. The EU is far less willing to let a long-established but obsolete industry die out, far less willing to tell a company that it needs to adapt to new technology to stay in business, and far less willing to tell people that the world has changed. As a result, the EU is a technology backwater, and all the innovation and big business is happening elsewhere; and now that they are faced with foreign innovation the EU is doubling down with regulations that are doing nothing more than cementing the dominance of those foreign companies.

Do you have some examples of the "hostility toward disruptive innovation"?

Some that immediately come to my mind:

1. The right to be forgotten, which tries to turn back the clock to an earlier age when search engines did not exist.

2. Copyright extremism (yes, there are places where it is worse than the USA) e.g. the EU copright directive.

3. Photography rules, which, unlike the USA, restrict the use of cameras in public and may render selfies illegal in some cases.

4. GDPR

I see no issues with right-to-be-forgotten, this should be in practice.

GDPR is fantastic and is forward-thinking.

GDPR has slowed the deployment of privacy-preserving technologies because it was poorly thought out and is based on a lot of bad assumptions. It has also created a larger burden for running a user-facing web company in Europe, to the benefit of the very incumbent companies it was meant to target without actually changing anything about their business models.

As for the right to be forgotten, that is nothing more than an attempt to restore yesterday's status quo. The fact is that computers are very good at storing data, indexing that stored data, and finding more data to add to searchable indexes. The only reason this so-called "right" can even be enforced is that the search market is dominated by a single search engine; if that market were more competitive, something that could theoretically happen at any time (and ironically something the EU seems to want to have happen), it would quickly become impossible to actually enforce the "right." Basically this is like the "right to fly around on a broomstick" -- it is not really grounded in reality.

The 2019 Global Innovation Index† top 10:

   Switzerland     67.24    1   HI    1   EUR   1
   Sweden          63.65    2   HI    2   EUR   2
   USA             61.73    3   HI    3   NAC   1
   Netherlands     61.44    4   HI    4   EUR   3
   United Kingdom  61.30    5   HI    5   EUR   4
   Finland         59.83    6   HI    6   EUR   5
   Denmark         58.44    7   HI    7   EUR   6
   Singapore       58.37    8   HI    8   SEAO  1
   Germany         58.19    9   HI    9   EUR   7
   Israel          57.43   10   HI   10   NAWA  1

7 out of the top 10 countries are in Europe: https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii-2019-report – first and second are both European.

Combined European countries have more top 100 science & technology innovation clusters (31) than the US (26) and China (18). That's using data on pages 64 and 65 of the report.

Where in Europe have you been to out of curiosity? I've been to multiple locales in Spain, France, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, and Finland – passed through Austria and Slovenia. In fairness I do not know central and eastern Europe very well.

† “The Global Innovation Index (GII) is an annual ranking of countries by their capacity for, and success in, innovation. It is published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in partnership with other organisations and institutions” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Innovation_Index

Disruptive innovation -- innovations that render entire industries obsolete, challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc. I have also been to plenty of European locales -- in France, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Norway -- and I have seen and met with plenty of people doing innovative work, but not much in the way of disruptive innovation.

Ever heard of Linux? Consider it disruptive? Did you know it was invented in Europe?

Actually, the Linux kernel is from Europe, it is in no way disruptive (it never challenged the status quo), and GNU software that is typically used with Linux came from the USA and is also in no way disruptive.

The Linux Kernel had many, many, competitors when it came out.

It was incredibly disruptive, and continues to be so where 90% of servers runs off of it and almost all embedded systems use it.

Are you just trying to troll, or are you trying to rewrite history?

That is not what "disruptive" means. Linux is popular, but it did not create any of the markets where it is used. Linux did not break any business models (the GPL might have, but that license is not specific to Linux, nor is Linux specific to the GPL, nor did the GPL come out of Europe). Linux did not change how we use computers in any fundamental way. I am not even sure what "innovation" the Linux kernel represents -- what about the Linux kernel, other than how it was licensed, was game changing? What is fundamentally different about Linux (specifically Linux) compared to other kernels?

I'm not sure disruptive is best attributed as to only mean market creation. Even the basic definition of the term doesn't suggest the construction of something new, but rather to undermine an existing system. And in that sense, I'd say the linux kernel did help dissolve the previous era of Unix-as-a-product market, and the industry that ran on that model (solarix, aix, hp, etc).

And while linux itself did not construct the open source market, linux + GNU did together strongly reroute the software (syadmin, dev) market towards open source models -- which of course screwed with all tooling development companies dramatically, creating the awkward divergent setup of SaaS w/ subscription vs Enterprise on-prem companies we have today (on-prem for non-enterprise mostly getting covered by OS) -- and that divergence is a pretty clear indicator that some kind of disruption occurred

It sounds like you agree with what I said: the GPL disrupted the market. Linux did not have anything to do with that and GNU was already making waves before Linux came along, and the effort to release BSD under an open source license was already underway in the late 80s. The shift you described would almost certainly have happened if Linux had never been written.

Linux is the one that won. I don’t see how things would be much different if some BSD version or another Unix won out for server market share.

I assume disruptive means the world would be different without the product.

Similarly, Git not being around wouldn’t change much practically speaking. For all we know, Git won because of Linus. Otherwise other version control were and are similar enough. Mercurial is a prime example for the nascent time period.

OTOH, GitHub changed things. Moved from Sourceforge and in some cases, some of the mailing lists/personally hosted source codes + being part of the reason some open source stopped using some of the popular but in my opinion, kitschy and lackluster bug trackers. GitHub also inspired the copy cat Gitlab project which is now itself a unicorn worth $2B or so. Yes I know Gitlab has differentiators before and even more now. It being very heavily inspired if not lifting from GitHub for parts of it is a point of GitHub’s influence, not a critique of Gitlab.

It isn’t as certain that we would have one such dominant platform like GitHub and the new runner up and alternative of Gitlab if GitHub didn’t exist.

Linux kernel powers Android making it the most used OS kernel in the world: “Android is more popular than Windows globally; it has battled Windows for the most-used rank with them switching sides, but currently has 15% more use” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... – Ergo, disruptive.

I think you are confusing "popular" with "disruptive." Linux is popular, but it did not open a new market or revolutionize an existing one. If Linux had not been written we would have used a different kernel in smart phones, likewise with our servers, our desktops, our laptops, and everything else Linux runs on.

We are on the same page here it seems. This isn’t the only case of this issue, but mixing popularity with disruption is a prime example. Another common one is the most popular product is the best because otherwise it wouldn’t be the most popular. Android and iOS vs webOS (I am incredibly bias in my love for it) or Windows Phone 7.

In the energy sector alone:

The first full scale fusion reactor: https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines

Europe is striving to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

Both of those projects/initiatives “render entire industries obsolete” and “challenge cultural norms on a fundamental level, etc.”

So your examples are government projects that have yet to be completed? Also I fail to see how either of your examples challenges any cultural norms, and while a successful fusion reactor would render an entire industry obsolete, how does a mandate to be climate neutral do so (obsolete does not mean "we changed the law so that you are not allowed to use this technology anymore")? I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished (assuming that the American efforts to deploy practical fusion power are not finished first).

Well, would you consider the Internet to be disruptive? Guess what; that was a government project.

Libertarian capitalism isn't the only source of disruptive innovation. I'd even go so far and say that without government intervention, disruptive innovation cannot be created. In your own example; by forcing technology to be carbon neutral, the EU forces companies to innovate out of well trodden paths and to consider new paradigms that otherwise would be worth cost. LED light technology wouldn't be where it is today without governments forcing out incandescent light bulbs.

I did not say government projects do not count, I said government projects yet to be completed do not count, because incomplete projects have not disrupted anything. The fact is that you can only identify disruptive innovations post facto -- plenty of inventions that were supposedly going to be disruptive wound up being flops that have been mostly forgotten (easy example: the zeppelin).

As I said, "I guess I'll stay tuned, and maybe change what I said in 30 years once these projects are finished..."

Edit: To your other point about the EU forcing companies to innovate, the reality is that innovation cannot always be forced. The effort could simply fail to achieve its goals, or it may turn out that the technology needed to achieve those goals is not economically viable, etc. It is also possible that the innovation will not actually be disruptive, it may wind up augmenting existing industries and allowing those industries to grow by balancing their carbon emissions with e.g. some kind of carbon capture (powered by existing renewable technologies, avoiding the need for things like base load by being opportunistic with carbon capture), never actually challenging the status quo or enabling anything that would be unthinkable today.

Genuine question: if Europe is so innovative and has so many clusters, why then did Airbus headquarter Airbus Ventures in Silicon Valley?

[Where and how people spend their money is the best way of measuring what people really think].

The US had the opportunity to stop the purchase of Instagram, just as aching could have stopped any purchase of Tencent.

Stop the purchase many if not most thought was an overpay by a company that was still possibly a fad? Facebook fully opened to the public in 2009. IG was bought in 2012 as an iPhone only app. No web app, no android app. iPhones were not a big market at the time.

Edit: I don’t recall now. The android app may have been in public beta or just released at the time.

> without protecting them from multi-nationals

That's sort of a strawman though.

There's a spectrum of "protection". What China does (and the Trump administration proposes, sorta, with its application-level bans) isn't to merely "protect" it's local companies, it's to entirely ban content from global competitors.

The problem isn't that Baidu search was "protected" while developing, it's that a Chinese citizen cannot do a search on Google at all. Or follow someone on Twitter. Or join a Facebook group. Anything you might show to the "public" on any of these sites is invisible in China.

That is the problem. Not "protection" per se.

Yes - language and cultural barriers already allow for a divergence. There is no protection needed there as they already exist "naturally".

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