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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well.

In all seriousness - giving yourself an advantage is obviously what all companies want to do.

Why doesn’t the EU just, for each company, say exactly what they want? I honestly don’t understand the EU - they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?

Seems like an exercise in mediocrity. I guess par for the course given all of the EUs top companies were all started last century. Clearly out of touch.

Edit: wow the top 15 EU companies by revenue are utilities or auto.

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So what's the alternative you're proposing? That we let companies abuse their position and do whatever they want?

> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?

Let's imagine the answer to this question is yes. Let's assume the EU doesn't want any company to do anything to have an advantage and that they believe a company should gain or lose market only based on the quality of their output. Would that be a bad thing?

Presumably having a better product itself is inherently advantageous and thus disadvantageous to competitors. Seems bad to me.

The alternative is if they don’t like the company they should just ban wholesale.

I honestly don’t see the point of banning bundling. There are plenty of bundled things that are ignored. Great example of this ironically is iMessage in the EU. Bundled but dwarfed by WhatsApp.

> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?

You could just have a better product

It's quite the simple thought experiment, if teams is a better product than the alternatives no harm will come of it from being unbundled from unrelated products

If on the other hand its usage will fall then that means that there were better (for some users) products whose creators were being harmed not because of any fault of their product but because their product wasn't owned by an established company which could exploit its own position

> Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

> In the year 2081, the Constitution dictates that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, earpiece radios for the intelligent that broadcast loud noises meant to disrupt thoughts, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.

https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...

Teams is "an exercise in mediocrity".

The problem is that big companies are distorting competition simply due to their size. Smaller companies cannot compete. Startups are mostly doomed. How can they compete when a bigger player can copy their innovation, bundle it, or sell it at a loss, or for free? You can’t afford to sue them. You may note ven prevail given their ownership of numerous patents. There is no fair competition if these companies are not broken up. Or in the least, they need to be taxed differently.

All EU countries indeed have systems in place to limit undue advantages that any child can have (it's called a public education system and social security and later in life just "the law").

As for anti-trust issues, you clearly don't understand them.

You’re correct. I am not an expert on anti trust, but I do see that the EU has missed the boat on every new industry in the 21st century compared to the USA.

We will see in 100 years if regulation was the right move or not.

As for education - I doubt all public education in the EU is equivalent, or tutoring is banned, or additional resources, etc.

>I am not an expert on anti trust, but I do see that the EU has missed the boat on every new industry in the 21st century compared to the USA.

Are you able to cite any examples of 'missing the boat'?

Not the GP, but from the top of my head:

- semiconductor manufacturing

- Internet and social media, streaming services, etc.

- Cryptocurrencies

- Smartphones and related app stores

- Electric cars

- Self-driving cars

- AI

It certainly feels like all the technological innovation happens in the US, and sometimes in China, but never in Europe.

> Internet and social media, streaming services, etc.

The very WWW originated at CERN in Europe.

> Cryptocurrencies

For all we know Satoshi could've been an European. Same goes for Nicolas van Saberhagen. Vitalik is neither European nor from the US. I'm not an expert, but most of the US cryptocurrency startups I see are cheap pyramid schemes, and no real innovation anymore.

> AI

DeepMind was a British company. It had several successes, and was acquired by Google later, which raises a question what does it mean "innovation happens in the US". In this case innovation happens in UK, but it's owned by a American company.

There's certainly a lot more, but (similarly to you) I don't keep track of nationality of every company I interact with. And the question is pretty fuzzy in case of very international companies.

Some counter points:

ARM originated at a European company (Acorn/Olivetti).

Bluetooth originated at a European Company (Ericsson)

Psion, Nokia, and Ericsson invented what would be considered the basics of the Smartphone (via Symbian, Series 60 etc)

Spotify is a Swedish company.

Nokia and Ericsson produce a good amount of the telecoms infrastructure equipment.

While Europe certainly hasn't had a start-up culture on par with the US it hasn't been a complete slouch either.

Acorn was a British company, not European, and had significant help from Apple since 1980s. Nokia never really had any significant share of smartphone market once it took of. Nokia and Ericsson telecom infrastructure is inferior to Huawei's. I will give you Bluetooth and Spotify, but that's just a drop in a bucket.

Olivetti (an Italian company) took over Acorn in 1985. This was around the time the ARM processor was being developed. Acorn was in danger of going under at this time when one of their creditors bounced.

Apple didn't come along until much later.

>Acorn was a British company, not European

Last I've checked UK was firmly in Europe. I assume you meant something different, because literal interpretation makes no sense to me. Can you clarify?

Sorry, I meant it more like UK is in many regards more similar to the US, than to the rest of Europe. I mean stuff like common law vs civil law, the way you start/grow your business, access to financing, etc.

> I do see that the EU has missed the boat on every new industry in the 21st century compared to the USA.

Perhaps. But for completely different reasons, certainly not regulation. And furthermore, while this _may_ hurt the EU in the long-run, they are still very good at the kind of industries that employ a large number of people across all skillsets.

> We will see in 100 years if regulation was the right move or not.

No need to wait, we can see this right now. The internet and app economy is completely enshittified. Only regulation can fix this, the market had 20 years and it only got worse.

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