And it continues. The car was invented here but it takes an Australian visionary to push our car companies into the future. I am sure we will want to regulate Tesla soon too.
And it continues. The car was invented here but it takes an Australian visionary to push our car companies into the future. I am sure we will want to regulate Tesla soon too.
All these regulations just trying to keep those damn disruptors at bay. Innovation is forbidden here. But hey! It’s for our own good.
Yeah, this. Europe is an old continent that's mostly old money. The Europeans of today are rich mostly due to inherited wealth and former imperialism, not wealth they created themselves through innovation, with some families tracing their wealth back for centuries when land was cheap and plentiful and taxes were next to nothing that any hardworking person could buy land and build a business and while the wealth didn't go stratospheric, it still multiplied handsomely for their successors since "time in the market beats timing the market".
If you look at Europe's biggest and wealthiest companies, most of them are several decades if not centuries old with some of their major shareholders still being old European nobility, in contrast to the US where the top tech companies are at most 30 years old, with older ones that fail to innovate always dying in a healthy cycle (IBM, Sun, Oracle, SGI, etc.), leaving room for new players(FAANG) to come on the market and eat the lunch of the dinosaurs. While in Europe, with so much of the pie taken by the old players, there's no more room for new players to spring up since the old established ones pulled the ladder up after them.
The image of the typical wealthy successful German is not that of a hip 20-30 year old who built some cool business in his dorm room or his parents' garage like in the US, but of a 40 year old man with a Porsche who inherited his dad's machine shop and rolodex(typical owner of the famous Mittelstand that's always revered here on HN).
All this old wealth is very risk adverse and feels threatened by disruptions and will fight tooth and nail to keep their status quo.
Just take one of these comfy government jobs we’re providing and you’ll be fine. We'll even take care of your pension and give you "free" health care.
Also who’s the Aussie? If anyone is pushing on car companies these days I’d say it’s Elon Musk (Who is a South Africa born American)
The thing is, there’s no US style capital in EU. The American capitalist bankrolled all the internet when there was no clear path to make money from it.
I remember when YouTube was burning billions per year, Facebook being labeled as “would never be profitable”.
Is there the kind of money in Europe that would take these risks?
There was no way for the internet to be EU thing because when it was fresh god knows how many billions had to be spent to have it operate and cross fingers to be able to recoup that investment. Simply, there is no that kind of money in Europe.
If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.
Just to be clear: I never said we missed the bus because of regulation. But the fact that we react like that now shows we don’t have other ideas or means to respond.
China happened to actually have a true competitor, TikTok and the first instinct of the USA was to try to ban it or force acquisition.
>and the EU isn't making moves on Visa/Mastercard which are arguably just as critical.
They're arguably not as important in Europe. Credit cards aren't nearly as common here. It's largely debit cards and bank transfers. As I understand it, SEPA [0] allows Europe to sidestep Visa and MasterCard when necessary.
Before 1993 the internet was funded mostly by the US Government, which started funding research into packet-switched networking in 1961. In 1977, unhappy with the cost of operating the network, the US Government offered the internet to AT&T for a token sum. AT&T could see no way to make money from it, so declined. In 1987, they offered it to them for a token sum again, with the same response.
(Some pedants maintain the internet did not begin until 1987 with the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol, and that before then there was the ARPAnet. I feel that using the word "internet" for the network before 1987 is justified because the same services, e.g., email, mailing lists, ftp, telnet, netnews (what we now call Usenet, i.e., the newsgroups) that ran on the 1987 internet ran on the ARPAnet. Many users of the network probably didn't realize (or were only dimly aware) that anything had changed!)
Starting about 1986 for-profit corporations started offering access to the internet for a fee, but before 1993 even the largest of these for-profits -- Netcom probably -- was small as American corporations go. I would not be surprised if most of Netcom's revenue came from renting out shell accounts on Unix boxes with internet connections for $20 a month to individuals. (Before for-profit ISPs, the way an organization got on the internet was basically to lease a dedicated phone line from a telephone company. The organization at the other end of the dedicated phone line rarely charged money for routing the new organization's traffic.)
Aside from government contractors (e.g., Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc, and the Mitre Corporation) and the early ISPs I just described, possibly the largest internet for-profit at the start of 1993 was Brad Templeton's Clari-Net, which posted the output of some "news wire" (e.g., Associated Press or such) to netnews. (Netnews was much bigger then the web at the start of 93.) I doubt Clari-Net ever had more than 3 employees. It probably only ever had one.
In comparison, before the start of 1993, the US government had spent many billions of dollars on the internet -- over the course of 32 years if we count the package-switching research, not just when the internet got deployed in 1969.
Umm, no, the US DARPA bankrolled the intrnet, then corporations took it mainstream and for profit, not for loss. The modern WWW originated at CERN in Switzerland.
>Simply, there is no that kind of money in Europe.
Europe definitely has money to throw away, just look at Berlin airport and all the useless projects being bankrolled from EU tax money. How many startups could that have funded?
>If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.
Edit: Dailymotion(not Vimeo) is European and it seems to be able to pay their server bills.
False. In France at least, state-monopoly Minitel services shadowed early initial Internet development. Even as Internet took over, communication state monopolies clamped development with overpriced phone bills for a couple of years minimum. It is only when France Telecom got privatized and Free (owned by a former Minitel erotic chat mogul) disrupted them with widescale ADSL development that thing really took off.
> If you made the YouTube in Europe you would go bankrupt because you wouldn’t be able to pay the server bills.
False again, EU Youtube was Dailymotion, nothing but mismanagement over mismanagement, bad political decision over bad political decision.
And, nobody cares about Dailymotion. The Americans are shooting for complete take over of a media, not being just another small business doing video. That's why the huge capital is needed and that's why Youtube was never profitable until being acquired by Youtube and that's why only now "Youtube ads are so annoying".
I really wonder why it took PayPal and Ebay to demonstrate that the same thing could be done on the real internet.
> former Minitel erotic chat mogul
I had to read this sentence twice to make sure.
His video on 5g (in French) is amazing: https://twitter.com/free/status/1338754060434944002
"There's a Weber effect and the Weber effect stops the 5g from working because of the sandals."
That said, I’m a little baffled that Ottawa can produce a behemoth like Shopify which has a market cap ($130bn) larger than Spotify (~$60bn) and Adyen (~55Bn) combined.
Same thing with them building online shopping websites; Amazon and Etsy already did the market research for them. It's either go with Amazon, setup your online sales infrastructure really fast or get crushed.
Now, in terms of market defining companies like Google or Apple, Canada has none. BlackBerry got crushed and failed to innovate. Nortel was wiped by Cisco and Huawei. Finally Bombardier's flagship plane was pretty much gifted to Airbus by the Trudeau administration who immediately submitted to the Trump administration.
This is like me developing a text rendering app on my laptop and claiming credit for the work of hardware engineering companies like Intel, Apple, etc.
I can already see politicians congratulating one another for creating all these jobs!
It is in the best interest of the E.U. to regulate Big Tech, if only because they are all from the U.S.
But with massive amount of economic muscle that tech companies can muster, specially if they work together, not to mention most of EU still "protected" by NATO, I doubt EU will manage to anything big anytime soon.
Depends which developed countries and which industries. It is much more common than what it appears on the surface.