The EU does actually have a variety of "internet" companies – and that includes Germany! There are certainly less of them; regulation could be one of the things that affects that, but it seems way more likely to be a wildly different environment for funding. Investors are more conservative and far less likely to throw dumb money at anything that moves, which means fewer successful unicorns. I'm not sure that's the best approach, but I'm not an investor.
they spend endless amounts of energy on agonizing over the GDPR
No they don't. GDPR compliance is generally fairly straightforward for any company which isn't trying to deliberately harvest and profit from your data—particularly a new company with no legacy—and in any case represents a set of practices that should be followed by any company dealing with private data in any case.
By the same token, those startups have to worry far less about the nonsense patent and IP environment in the US. So worst case we'll call it a wash.
We sanctioned ourselfes by making the use of foreign SAAS illegal.
This did not happen. Use of non-EU SaaS is legal, subject to it being compliant with local regulation.
I'm always a bit weirded out by strenuous objections to GDPR – it seems to me that the data privacy environment in Europe is broadly pretty sensible. You need to:
- know what data you are using
- have a good justification for using it
- take appropriate precautions to secure it
- make sure users are aware of what you are doing with it
- allow users to access and correct the data you hold on them
I find it hard to object to that.