I would love for there to be a vibrant European tech scene. But these same sort of business-hostile behavior is exactly why there isn't a European version of Silicon Valley.
We just don't have that unicorn culture. But do we need highly overvalued tech businesses?
A market made up of clones and forks, all worse than the prop competition.
Alone food quality is on a whole different level in Europe, exactly because we have, allow and welcome small time players reinventing the market.
They are just as privacy invasive as US albeit with less financing which means they are even more ruthless and hostile.
But there is ? Go to Paris, Berlin, Lisboa, Barcelona, ... There is a lot of start-ups, incubator, investor, meet-ups, conference, etc. The EU has a very vibrant tech scene. It is probably more distributed than the U.S, by nature, and not on the same scale. But acting as if the E.U is some sort of ludite, back water, hostile to business, is just plain wrong and huge exaggeration.
trying to regulate monopolies is business-hostile? maybe sometimes its needed to hurt a monopolist business in order to .. enable competition..
The small business owner pays taxes because what else can they do? Big corps go through tax-havens and relocations and don't do so, while profiting off of the infrastructure paid for by taxes (=> enabling customers over seas to even buy iphones). Traditional companies ship physical products and/or employ more people in the respective countries, while they also try to evade taxation I think those circumstances make them a much better subject to it though.
Really, the more I keep on talking to my friends in the Valley the more it boils down to the money factor. Salaries, VCs and all the likes. I don't say Europe shouldn't be less business hostile, but one should see the Valley the way it is and realize that just buy changing the laws and trying to copy it Europe can't succeed. They should find their own path.
I mean, I indirectly benefit from the grift, but I am not one to put some lipstick on this particular pig.