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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

Our instinct is to regulate and tax the technologies that are being pioneered in California, in the misguided belief that it will give us some kind of competitive advantage.

I don’t think that that’s the reason for regulation: it seems to me that US companies traditionally don’t care about externalities (environment, privacy, accessibility, etc.), and regulation is required to bring them into line. That doesn’t always mean that their business model will survive unscathed, but that’s generally a good thing.

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This is a bad stereotype, I think. The US has regulatory failures like FTX, but at least that's a brand new market and type of commodity (or currency, maybe). And it was prosecuted under existing regulation anyway. The EU had Wirecard, a financially totally mundane company, and regulations didn't stop anything. It happens everywhere.

The difference is that the US is a force multiplier for businesses and innovation, so you get the most extreme stuff there. But you also get the most everything there. And even when it's not there, it's often funded or part-funded by the US. E.g. the NIH funds $45b of research a year, which is partly sent overseas, even though it's paid for by US taxpayers and businesses.

    > The EU had Wirecard

To me, this is misleading. Please stop writing as though all of the EU is uniform. It would be better to write: "Germany had Wirecard". That is much more accurate.

They're both accurate, in that people are talking about Europe, and the EU regulatory environment. Germany is more precise geographically.

The US can also throw a firehose of money at stuff just by virtue of being big and more of a monolith than Europe, in general.

To be honest I'm not sure European companies are much better (VW emissions scandal, BP oil spill in Gulf of Mexico etc), it's just that regulation tends to be tighter. US seems quite happy to create global monopolies at the cost of its own domestic environment / consumer rights.

Yes, they are regulated abroad because they are rightly frightened of what SV will do to them without it, it's unrelated to "competitive advantage".

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