Why do they gate access at country level if it's about language. I live in Europe and speak English just fine. Can't they just offer it in English only until the multi-language support is ready?
Admitting that you know that your product may create legal liabilities is not a very smart thing to do.
The counterpoint is that this doesn't actually work in practice.
"We committed to meet all the regulation in each country we're operating in. Our teams are working on it. In the meantime we'll start in our domestic market, because obviously if there has to be a first country to open it would be our origin country, right?"
And the last thing we need is more competition in ad tech.
And so have Eindhoven (ASML), London (Revolut, Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo), Paris (DailyMotion, AppGratis), Berlin (Soundcloud, Mister Spex, Zalando, Helpling, Delivery Hero, Home24 and HelloFresh) and Amsterdam (Sonos (ok, technically Hilversum), Booking.com, TomTom) etc, etc. So what?
Tech companies exist the world over. The specific kind of tech company that requires a mountain of free cash and that can monopolize a whole segment is a SV anomaly and Microsoft is the exception simply because of when it started.
It's also an issue with capital. Everyone was shocked when Mistral raised what, 300M dollars? Ask on the street if anyone's heard of Mistral, and then ask about ChatGPT.
Meanwhile effing xAI from Elon, that no one really cares about is looking to raise $1B.
Here in Europe we're sadly not on the same level. Available capital is smaller. Reach is smaller (in practice but not in theory). Profit margins are smaller. Regulation is higher.
In 2023 you need extreme luck to create something in Europe that reaches a global audience to the point it's not worth trying. Just go for your local domestic market instead.
What are you talking about? Booking is 5.3B revenue, 112B market cap. Adyen is 37B market cap. These are not "tiny" companies compared to public tech companies in the US, and there are more than just these two.
Sure, Europe doesn't have as many frothy VC's and associated tech companies with insane valuations as the US. But it's not trailing out in last place like some of these comments make it out to be.
People need to look at actual facts and numbers before regurgitating the same old memes about how terrible Europe and the EU are.
But they're also right in the sense that regulation acts like a barrier in many parts of the world. I had often wondered why did Linus Torvalds and other Engineers travelled to Silicon Valley to found Linux, etc? Did they not find opportunity in Finland or any other nearby European countries?
I'd attribute most of the gap to regulatory and cultural difference.
I’ve been mentoring startups in EU for over 10 years and there were only a handful that had issues with regulation, but 95% had issues with a language/country lock in.
It's not striking that the EU is as wealthy per-person as it is and has so few tech unicorns. It's also not striking for a region with hundreds of millions of people. What's striking is that despite being wealthy and populous, the region hasn't done too well with tech.
I'd say that it's even changed during my own lifetime. There was a time when German cars had a much larger market share and Nokia was a dominant phone company. Nokia failed the transition into the smartphone era and while German cars are still great, their market share in EVs is much, much smaller. And it's not like there's a lack of talent. Plenty of Europeans are building huge tech companies, but a large fraction are choosing to do so in the US or other similar markets, like Canada (e.g., Shopify).
What does the second part of the sentence have anything to do with creating tech companies?
Litigation is probably inescapable. I'm sure they want to be on solid footing.
you typically see brazen behavior from ignorance.
Edit: grammar.
So was Stadia - restricted to US at the beginning.
Also their are very slow at adding non-English languages to their offering.
1. This stuff is available in like Angola and Thailand but not in Germany or France. Oh how the European giant has fallen.
2. ... but it's also not available in the UK. So the long shadow of EU nonsense affects us too :-(
On 2 yeah it does. Seems like the UK keeps falling behind on everything now that it lives in the shadow of the continent and can’t seem to create any value and nobody cares about that market. So much for the MaSiVe TraDe DeALZ we were getting unlocked…
Dude, we're talking about Google here...
Eh, given that Europe struggles to build anything tech related, I'm going to say it's pretty hard. Far easier to make overpriced luxury handbags and the like.
The anti-European gloating on HN is getting tiresome, and imho is a pretty big blind spot of HN moderation.
I'm also not quite sure it's xenophobia, but it's something other than calm and rational. Whenever Europe comes up in a HN thread, there's a sudden glut of snide comments and gloating, as if people are desperate for themselves and others to believe their layoffs-stricken industry is amazing nonetheless. Maybe to distract themselves from the mandatory RTO bad news?
Rather than calling it xenophobia, let me call it adversarial, and it's always the same side initiating it. Very, very tiresome.
I'm also willing to bet a very high % of the same demo would readily call HN an explicitly American forum and that inclusiveness or being welcoming to others shouldn't be a priority of the site, which I personally find just sort of jarring anywhere on the web, since https doesn't know borders and I grew up in the very overtly international FOSS community as an engineer. You know, where we make that Linux thing you probably have ten copies of on devices around you right now that started in Finland.
> OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury.
Only for a very narrow definition of "tech" that doesn't include the vast majority of engineering disciplines, as well as basic research and the education that enables the "tech".
I will take, for example, BioNTech over most startups posted on HN, and I'd rather we build another ITER than another Twitter clone.
Your bio says you're an R programmer. Are you aware the R foundation is a European (Austrian) org, like most organized open source? Seems those Europeans have quite a bit of time for tech after all.
At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.
Contractors get taxed 19% flat rate and a small% for health insurance (even less in IT - 9%?). Whereas full time workers get taxed similarly to people in the west.
The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.
The bigger company will have inhouse or retainered lawyers who'll deal with it.
Almost all regulation acts as a barrier which protects bigger companies who can pay lawyer fees without blinking.
It's amazing how much of the HN crowd sides with the bureaucracies which are basically pals of the guys with deep pockets.
No, they can't. It's not an automated system that automagically fines companies if they get flooded by fake emails or whatever, they're pretty reasonable most of the time and you get given plenty of chances to work with regulators before they decide to fine you even a single euro (assuming you're guilty in the first place). Even if you get fined, they're usually scaled to the severity of the offense as well as the company's size.
Plus the solution is super simple, just don't invasively track your users without consent! I love that I can use the GDPR to tell my manager to fuck off when he talks about using some invasive tracking bullshit on our users, I'm glad it's there.
I'm not sure if this[0] is the most up-to-date list (I've seen a number of these lists), but take a look yourself. Most of these fines are tiny, certainly not earth shattering for any company of any size with any stability.
And if your business can't survive the financial burden of complying with GDPR, then good. There's no reason for a small business to even be violating it in the first place, since we've had about a decade of forewarning at this point regarding these privacy laws.
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