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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

A 15-people business is most definitely a small business.

> complying to the available laws.

That's why Europe has gotten into its present sorry state when it comes to IT. They're winning all the law-related battles but they've lost the big war, just look of how all of Europe is a slave to the American IT industry (after all, we're having this conversation on a an American-run forum, even though I presume that we're both EU citizens).

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Well-capitalized American consumer software companies have been able to outcompete European competitors by taking a product developed for the US and offering it in the EU market at zero marginal cost. In areas of IT where zero-marginal-cost expansion is not so easy (e.g. industrial control software that comes bundled with the equipment it is controlling) there doesn't seem to be much of an American advantage.

Stringent regulations that American companies won't be compliant with without extra effort can be expected to increase the relative competitiveness of European companies in the EU.

That might be true, but it’s also the reason we don’t have a Zuckerberg or Musk taking charge of EU politics. There’s a balance to be struck here, and I prefer this over being a slave to American big tech.

No. It's von der Meyer and other plutocrats, making every country lose sovereignty in ever expanding ways. We went from better trade and transport to a bureocratic unaccountable beast that eats money at insane speed and becomes more censorious, pro war and power hungry with each year that passes.

There's benefits, but there's a LOT of cons that people refuse to admit, and this is not saying "brexit was better", just that EU politics are riddled with corruption and pretending we're good because we try to compare ourselves to a different context in the USA is just pointless.

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