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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I wish the EU were as good at creating tech companies as they are at regulating them.

As a EU citizen, if I had to chose between those two, I'd go for regulating.

Sure, I don't get perks like SV level salaries (and the costs of living to go with it), but I do believe regulation like this takes a large amount of vision and courage, and I'm proud the EU is going for it.

If you think about it, without regulation, whatever is technically possible will be done because somebody profits in some way from it, or merely enjoys it. A lot of really horrible things are technically possible.

I agree; also an EU citizen, working with AI. I think regulation can be a great forcing function for creating more effective, thoughtful, and overall better products.

Your point would be better made if you gave any examples of such more effective, thoughtful and better products.

I'm not making a point, just sharing my opinion.

But one thing that I think is better across multiple products is my ability to request that my identifying information be removed from a service within a reasonable time frame. Or the ability to minimize storing/sharing of my personal information when using a service. Or being able to obtain a copy of the data a company has on me.

EU regulates tech companies because they are foreign. Go see the EU regulation on ICE cars to see the stark difference.

Europeans like you need to realize that you have been fed a whole lot of moral superiority propaganda by pro-EU entities; none of which has any merit. Go look at how much they regulate Bayer to give but one example.

The fact that the whole Volkswagen affair was uncovered in the US is really telling. Had they created a stricter US version we would never know.

I actually was thinking about saying "maybe you can only do the one, not the other". I think it's naive to assume that any one country or association will regulate without regarding the effects on their economy and political position. Sad, but logical.

Doesn't make this piece of regulation bad. FWIW, I did applaud the US for going hard after VWs Diesel shenanigans.

As somebody from Europe I can't agree more about the moral superiority thing. Feels like Europe has cultivated its own version of "saving face" during the last decades.

The problem with that approach is it can leave you powerless to foreign governments in the long run.

Without airbus for example, the US would be able to impose all kinds of rules on Europe. The US could’ve said that any airline purchasing American commercial aircraft must adhere to the US travel ban list.

Sitecore, Unity, SAP, Spotify, Nokia, Larian Studios...

European universities => SIMULA, Prolog, OCaml, Modula-2, Pascal, Coq, Agda, Miranda, F#, Java Generics, .NET Generics, Scala...

ASML, Dassault, Siemens...

So much of our global computing infrastructure is outside the US that when people complain about lack of tech industry outside US, I find it laughable. I hate that tech has been reduced to only the software side, mostly because it makes a lot of money. But all the physical technology and it's innovation happens outside US, it's just not seen because they don't slap their logo on everything.

What does it have to do with AI?

He said creating tech companies. Not AI companies.

we’re talking about tech companies, see above.

anything that can do a linear regression is AI these days

Parent talked about tech companies, not "AI". If you mean companies focusing on generative AI, there's a few here, like Mistral.

That list, with the exception of SAP, is everything but impressive when compared to US companies.

Even Oracle (remember them?) has a higher market cap than all of those companies combined.

any recent company though?

That wasn't part of the question, but since you ask.

https://mistral.ai/

Yeah I know Mistral, good one. its almost the only one in AI though.

They aren't the only one, there are plenty of other gold diggers trying to ride AI wave.

Just go to any European Startup event.

I like mistral very much, and this is the kind of company that is still giving me hope. However from a market size POV it is completely inexistant compared to giants like openAI, or even google with gemini.

It’s still a very very tiny and fragile company. I will be proven wrong once it reaches the hundred of millions customers, and become one the first EU tech giant since the past 25 years.

Unity re-homed to the US. SAP is a company that inflicts itself upon the industry: it is truly garbage-tier software. Nokia is a pale shadow of what it once was. Larian, OK? They're a game studio. Spotify just annihilated its workforce.

Companies with any flex in Europe are shambolic things that prey (see SAP) on customers working in a highly-regulated industry.

Larian outsources most of their work to cheaper countries, so they don't have to pay benefits and can boast about not doing layoffs.

All companies do that, that wasn't the question.

I'm talking about tech companies.

The list of tech companies you quoted, if that's the best you could find, is definitely proving my point.

Companies is not somehow the highest form of tech. Academic contributions are equally as valid. I understand we are on HN but let's not overtly glorify companies this much.

Cherry picking when proven wrong.

Or rather preventing moving goalpost. You’re citing nokia, founded in the 19th century, and SAP, founded 54 years ago, as a counter-argument to my assertion that EU isn’t good at creating tech companies. Should I have added that i was talking about the current century ?

You also talk about university and technologies created in their research labs. Which is totally irrelevant to my point.

I’m talking about the fact that EU definitely has a problem in its ability to create strong technology business and brands, and that it’s starting to become a huge problem for our economy. It was an economical statement, and you completely missed the point.

Nope, I thought you would be clever enough to fill the remaining ...

Those university research labs power many computing stacks nowadays, without which the American companies that depend on them for their existence would have had a complete different outcome going to market.

Rest assured, thanks to the way US is behaving with globalisation, if we don't get ourselves busies fighting yet another war, we might as well create The Great Wall of Europe, with Linux Desktop running on RISC-V.

There you have it, Finn technology, with a Swiss hardware consortium.

Economy as in “making profit and creating jobs”. Which those american tech companies do, and our university don’t. i’m not even sure if you’re trolling now..

If thought people got paid while working at universities, and then use that money to foster local economy.

Apparently not.

I also wish the US would be more responsible in regulating instead of creating overarching monopolistic companies.

I think a matter of perspective.

In tech markets if your product/service is good, it very easily becomes a monopoly, because adoption is easy and there is no reason for users to stick with an inferior product. Of course monopolies are still harmful. But that is beyond the point I am making. US tech companies aren't monopolies because of lack of regulation, but rather because they just have better products.

No doubt in the quality and time to market, however every single of these monopolistic companies have done monopolistic actions like bundling products, abusing their platforms, etc. After the initial success, their behavior matters.

It's not always easy to tell artificial bundling from genuine synergies. E.g. due to yet another EU regulation we don't have a proper integration between Google search and Google maps any more, and it definitely feels like a worse product from user's perspective

100% agree. I would be the first doing the same. Being a regulated entity is stupid hard.

I would contend that is not the only reason. Plenty of times the bigger companies are just buying up their competitors. The most famous example being Instagram. Instagram could have been it's own big company, but now it's part of a monopoly. And that's just a big example which happened semi amicably. There are plenty of documented cases of VC funded companies throwing their weight around.

If you talk about the EU as an entity, the only power it has is to regulate. It’s the only thing it can do.

If you talk about the EU countries, the reason they’re not good at tech is because they’re too small to provide a market big enough to sustain a large tech company

IMHO more power ahould be given to the EU so that we can create EU wide companies, and protect those companies from foreign powers

We're mostly good at selling out here. We had one of the biggest and most innovative electronics industries on the planet. Then Philips bought them all and sold them.

ARM as well of course...

There is no market in the EU, or at least not one you can figure out or communicate with. Imagine trying to sell widgets in the US but you don't know the laws, cant speak English and you cant pronounce widget. Then when you learn all that you get one state and your mind resets back to not knowing laws, English or what your product is called. This happens with each new state you conquer.

They are good at keeping them small. Interestingly the EU throws around massive amounts of research money, without showing any interest in monetizing the results. Who else remembers the 400 million Euro (which was a lot of money at that time) being thrown at the search engine project Quaero?

I wish this meme would die whenever this topic is brought up. The EU is doing just fine in the tech industry, as sibling comments point out. What you might call excessive red tape and regulations, I see as much needed controls over an industry drunk on its own Kool-Aid, with little regard about the impact on its customers and society at large, often even maliciously so, fueled only by the promise of ever-increasing profits they made to their investors.

This opinion might be controversial on a forum run by a VC titan, but people in this industry need to realize that they're part of the problem.

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