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.
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
GDPR is fantastic and is forward-thinking.
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.
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
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
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?
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
[Where and how people spend their money is the best way of measuring what people really think].
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.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yello...
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of expression.