EU legislation doesn’t stifle innovation. It stifles abuse of technology. If the only innovation America and Asia can muster is abuses of technology (I know this isn’t the case but I’m borrowing from your statement) then I’m perfectly fine with the EU lagging behind.
European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
What I said was that if you take two cities which have same cost of living, the salary is like 2-3x higher in US.
Every time this conversation comes up on HN, the only examples people can cite is when remote working is taken into account. Which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.
> How many decades did it take for that to arrive there?
Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit.
> It will be the same story with AI.
I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case.
> European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. Not by a little, but by such a staggering margin that AWS does two OOMs more revenue.
> I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe.
The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.
What are these European tech companies that are competitive with Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, etc? I’d like to learn more.
> You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous.
Plus monopolies are bad for innovation so you could argue that Europe has a healthier ecosystem because it is tougher on monopolies than America.
> The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.”
You phrase that like it was a quote but in fact it wasn’t. The point being argued was that AI start ups couldn’t exist and I demonstrated they could.
Europe is also a hotspot of AI research:
https://odsc.medium.com/top-ten-european-ai-research-labs-fo...
> The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.
England was in the EU 10 years ago, EU legislations were carried over to English law after “Brexit” and the fact that they were good enough to be bought by Google also demonstrates that European companies can be seen as a threat.
> A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
And a lot of them don’t. I had my worked for a single American subsidiary in my 20 years of experience in Europe. Same is true for a lot of my friends too.
I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
Let’s quantify it so it’s not ridiculous. Since getting their head start, they have ”lost” about 90% of total market share to American companies who are doing a better job. And this is before the new transfer framework that cane out this month. What is the value prop of OVH without regulatory capture?
> Europe is also a hotspot of AI research
This is absolutely true. Amsterdam for example produces outstanding ML research. But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies!
> I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
For what it’s worth, I live in northern Europe. As you point out, European universities are great. They are an AI research hotbed and they produce highly capable undergrads. But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.
This is a different argument to the one originally pitched though. And you cannot just assume the reason OVH hadn’t exploded like AWS did was due to EU regulation.
> But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies
Again, I work for a European AI tech firm.
> But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.
I think it is. I just think European tech firms are generally happier to grow organically. I think it’s more a case of different cultures. America is all about growth above all else. Whereas Europe is often more about user experience. European firms are often less aggressive at advertising outside of Europe too (maybe that’s a language barrier?)
I do honestly think the European tech market is healthy. It’s just different to the US market. The problem is the American school of capitalism is all about market dominance whereas European companies seem a little less obsessed with that. But that doesn’t mean Europe isn’t doing some exceedingly good work.
As a European, I value the fact that we have such a vibrant ecosystem.
What country are you talking about? Definitely not Germany.
> America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
Berlin startup scene is a joke compared to the Silicon Valley though. Cambridge, London, Zürich, maybe Munich I would agree to a certain degree - but not Berlin. The rule of thumb is that it's better outside of EU though.
That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability. This is the price. Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products. I hope for your sake that I am wrong.
You keep saying this but I’m not seeing any evidence it’s true. There have always been plenty of companies in Europe that have had data centre scale compute too (plus managing a data centre requires that level of understanding as well so I don’t agree with you dismissing OVH.
Plus you keep saying it’s taken a decade for the EU to catch up and on those timescales it would put things before GDPR et al. Thus EU legislation would have no impact even if your point was true.
> Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products.
At risk of sounding repetitive: I work for a European AI firm.
We actually have a lot of American clients — so the exact inverse of the point you’re making.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
> Although Europe has many high-performing companies, in aggregate European companies underperform relative to those in other major regions: they are growing more slowly, creating lower returns, and investing less in R&D than their US counterparts.
which is exactly what I’ve been saying. There are plenty of high performing companies in Europe, we just aren’t as aggressive in chasing growth for growths sake.
If you want to ask why that is, then I’d argue it’s more a cultural thing than it is to do with legislation.
Should that culture change? Personally I’d rather it didn’t. Personally I think America needs to change to become more customer focused because a lot of American businesses are really shitty to deal with.
I get this point will be an unpopular opinion on a VC forum like HN. But it just goes to demonstrate that the situation isn’t so black and white as you’ve been making out.
It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI.
And the Carrefour AI stuff is hosted on OVH cloud (in France), I believe: https://www.carrefour.com/en/news/artificial-intelligence-op...
OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.
Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.
The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!
> As a guy with a startup...
If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.
So not tracking every single molecule of detail about your users is incompatible with building a good product?
If being entrepreneurial means that I have to violate my user's privacy then I'd rather not be an entrepreneur, thanks. And again, if your business can't survive without being invasive and malicious to your users, then your business shouldn't exist. You won't see me or anyone else reasonable weeping about the dissolution of such entities, either.
If GDPR was really that problematic then it would be all over the news instead of a few nationalists outside of EU arguing about hypotheticals on random message boards.
GDPR doesnt prohibit you from monitoring your product. It just gets very serious when you abuse users without them agreeing.
Like Threads not launching in EU because of that.
Let alone Mozilla (non-EU) and browser extensions (like ublock) did more for personal privacy than any of the aforementioned laws. And in contrast to creating a "level playing field with Big Tech" they made tech business in the EU a morass of legal insecurities for small businesses while big corps are still happily intruding individual's privacy in ways that our current legal system cannot even cover.
I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.
There is something though that’s chilling EU tech investment, whether it’s regulation or tech, regulation of funding vehicles, or some other artifact. All factors align to a vibrant EU tech sector, yet it’s just not present. This reflects in ludicrously low salaries, poor career prospects, and a lack of clout - better than trying to force tech standards via imperfect mechanisms like regulation the EU should be setting standards by virtue of its technical ability to create excellent tech standards and platforms.
The best EU tech talent I know is working at some American company, be it megacorps like Google or Amazon, JPMC, or smaller tech companies like Datadog, etc. I don’t gloat in this - I wish all the world were firing on all cylinders in tech, space, science, engineering innovation. That’s the only way out of our broken way of doing things that’s killing our planet and our society.
As a European software engineer I'm calling BS on your statement, Mr Manager. EU legislation might not aim to stifle innovation (in contrast, they're always talking about a "level playing field") but their imprecise and vague regulation texts are like a loose cannon for whatever innovative business might come up if you have your first hire to be "the lawyer who gives legal advice in context of EU regulation".
Now, those people will just quietly move away to find a new home-market for scaling up and then eventually selling to EU countries. This is not "lagging behind" but an economical fiasco since the same laws only help local oligopolies of gatekeeper enterprises and (the ones they initially aimed for) Big Tech who can afford licenses and lawyers.
Two little examples (but there's more):
- What about the safe harbor thing? It's all a grey area now after court rulings decided that pretty much all US-EU IT biz is at least partially violating the EU regulations.
- We're now all happily clicking cookie banners and startups are getting sued by third-rate law firms. Some things were good with GDPR but did it help with Big Tech's (and meanwhile Tiktok's) way of collecting data? Nope.
> like a loose cannon for whatever innovative business might come up if you have your first hire to be "the lawyer who gives legal advice in context of EU regulation".
But loose cannon is better than no cannon.
Also, how about not doing what is forbidden? You don't need to show cookie banner if you don't store cookies that helps to follow your users. You don't need to follow PII storing rules if you don't store PII.
Look, yes this rules are hard to follow sometimes but thats exactly why we have it.
I don't want to every company in the world to store my info without my consent and without possibility to delete it.
Sorry, but companies should deal with it.
If companies are so incapable of not harvesting data en-masse then they deserve to be sued out of existence and shut down for their shenanigans.
Also it's not really my experience having worked for a few EU tech companies. The small guys have 0 issues following the regulations, even without a single lawyer working there, since they're usually not so blinded by the prospect of infinite money and usually just stick to collecting what is necessary and nothing more. My company has 1 or 2 lawyers, but they're more there for things wholly unrelated to GDPR or anything like it, and we've never been on the sharp end of the legislation and likely never will be, assuming the suits don't drop 100IQ points and decide to go for "infinite" growth.
Even a cash-only business with no electronics anywhere would still need nontrivial GDPR compliance efforts because it has employees. Just because you need the data to run your business doesn’t automatically make you exempt without further paperwork. Your lawyers definitely do occasional GDPR compliance work.
https://www.dickinson-wright.com/news-alerts/the-gdpr-covers...
It’s a bit like accounting. You can structure your business operations is ways that make the accounting easier or harder, but unless you shut the business down you will always have done enough somewhere to need to think about (and probably file paperwork for) accounting/GDPR. And much like accounting, I’m not saying the GDPR is bad, but it’s also not a business activity that you can just ignore because you’re not running an adtech data vacuum or whatever.
Tell that to GitHub for instance: https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
And for a startup it's trivial to comply with GDPR because:
- you start from scratch, so you know not to collect more data than you need
- you don't need that much data to begin with
Edit: In addition with AI act and its very broad definition of what an AI is and a classification like "Education" you might end up in level "highest risk" just for calculating statistics on your quiz app (no one knows until a court rules). With Cyber Resilience Act and its application of the (physical) supply chain direction, your open source repo from 5 years ago might end up being a footgun with you being personally accountable for other companies using it in their product. And so on...
Legislation like this is effectively either the EU attempting to force their opinion of what is an acceptable use of tech on the rest of the world, or the EU committing to potentially fall behind on moral grounds. I actually greatly respect the second scenario if that's the situation, we'd all be better off if people chose their morals over profit and fear.
Honestly, my biggest complaints with EU software legislation are:
1. It doesn't scale down to tiny non-commercial or barely-commercial activities.
2. It theoretically proposes penalties on private people outside the EU (even though they are rarely imposed?).
3. I have no vote or representation.
For example, I used to provide tiny, free web apps that performed useful tasks. These often had fewer than 100 users, and they kept no information that wasn't strictly necessary. But if you emailed me about them, I might not respond within a month, especially if I was traveling or something. The GDPR requires 30-day turnarounds for lots of stuff. I shut down all of these apps, because some of my users might have been in the EU? And I won't be releasing any more free web tools. It's all CLI now.
Similarly, I host a small web forum in the US, and we have some EU users. We keep no information beyond that required to run a web forum. If you ask the moderators to delete all your posts on August 1st, well, I hope someone took their computer on vacation.
Similarly, I maintain a couple of open source projects. Many of these are paid for by an employer, who makes the code available for free. In the past, I have occasionally added a feature to one of my projects as a consulting project for someone. But reading through https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-eus-product-liability-dire..., I see that I am now likely to have personal liability for my open source projects, towards people who have never paid me a cent. Sure, I do have liability towards the rare consulting customer who actually paid for something, which is carefully negotiated in our contract. But in the future, some random EU company I've never heard of will likely be able to use my software, pay me nothing, and make me liable? It's very hard to tell with current drafts.
And I have at least one open source AI tool on GitHub, that's of no use to anyone. But I suppose I'll need to read the EU AI laws now, too.
Sometimes I just want to build useful stuff (web apps, forums, open source tools) and give it away for free. But if I have any European users, I may get entangled in complex European laws. Honestly, there's zero upside for me supporting EU users, because I'm not benefiting from them, and I keep having to read hundreds of pages of incredibly vague laws in multiple languages.
If the Product Liability Directive goes through in its current form, and if GitHub offers me a way to block EU downloads, I'll probably use it. I am not interested in supporting or encouraging commerical EU users who have never paid me anything.
Sure, I never tracked any information except what was absolutely necessary. No email address, no IPs, just logins, passwords, and data saved by the user. But that still means:
- I needed to respond to several kinds of emails within 30 days, even if I was on vacation.
- I needed to understand the frustratingly vague and abstract language of the GPDR.
- I was subject to 27 different data regulators, not all of whom provided information in languages I could read, I don't think?
As a non-EU resident, I have zero vote in any of this. I make zero money off of anyone in the EU. I would happily ignore the EU entirely, or allow EU users to download my stuff and to figure out their own laws.
But the EU claims jurisdiction over foreign nationals, even though we have no vote, no representation, and no commercial presence. There is precisely zero upside for me here.
And with the Product Liability Directive, it looks like the EU might impose personal liability on me as an open source author who occasionally consults for US companies. Which, since nobody in the EU is paying me a cent, I have no interest in assuming. If the final PLD is bad enough, I guess I can try to block downloads from European IPs or something.
If these laws were limited to real companies with an actual presence in Europe, I'd feel very differently. But extraterritorial laws for private citizens are gross.
EU legislation seems to work under the assumption that all meaningful engineering and innovation is performed at large companies the likes of Siemens.
The utter lack of meaningful influence and representation in the discussion is IMO the biggest culprit in this.
Because the leaders of companies like Siemens are the ones with speed-dial access to EU politicians who make the rules.
It's no surprise the the baggiest and wealthiest companies try to influence policies in ways that only benefits them at the expense of everyone else.
The difference is that biggest companies in EU are 100 years old industrial enterprises while in the US there are innovative tech companies.