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Comment by ivanjermakov | Hacker News Reader

I think Google leaving EU will result in more good than harm by shaping a better landscape for innovation and competition.

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As an European, I wish you were right, but I’m afraid you aren’t.

The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.

We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates. Most people fantasise with becoming rich, but as in, “I had a rich aunt that I didn’t even meet in my life and I was the sole heir” or “I won the lottery”, not as in “I grinded for the best 10 years of my life working 100 hours per week before I sold my company” that seems more prevalent in the US. Ordinary people here are super happy if they can buy a small place to live (not a humongous house) even if it takes 25 years to pay it in full, then finish work at 5 and take their kids to the park and have dinner at some restaurant on Saturday.

OTOH: I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.

Also, hopefully LLMs will diminish Google’s importance, and as long as there’s competitive models not from the US (Mistral, DeepSeek) we might be fine. But Google holds all the cards (data). With stuff like the Harvard animosity they might even stop attracting all the foreign talent.

Apple? There’s Samsung for phones at least. Amazon? They’ve become a Temu/Aliexpress. Facebook… huge win if they stopped doing business in Europe. MS? This is the year of Linux in desktop?

The Cloud is one of those things where the EU could build something competitive/alternative just with public funding. All running on Linux, of course.

> The EU would use public funding to build some sort of Google alternative and it would take ages, would be mediocre and most money would go to waste. Instead of incentivising entrepreneurship, which is what they probably should do.

Something like web search is basicallly part of a modern digital infrastructure. We don't want entrepreneurship in water or energy supply, I don't think we should rely on it in web search, because it will inevitably end up chasing profits over everything else.

Markets are good at driving cost down via competition, but once you reach a monopoly steady state there's not much left to optimize. I think a search utility would work just fine. The main barrier to entry is the huge storage and processing resources that are needed to make a good index. Google contains all the information out how to scale like that too.

The cost for operating web search could be down dramatically, when the websites were registering instead. This would solve the scraping issue and also put websites in how their operators actually care about.

> I think the current US administration is the best think that could happen to the EU, a big wake up call. Suddenly there’s money to invest in Defense and that kind of thing.

Not to derail the conversation, but IMO the current US administration isn’t a wake up call. It’s a temper tantrum by people who understand that the US isn’t as relatively wealthy to the rest of the world as it was after WW2 but don’t understand why. If some of the thrash accidentally improves the West’s defensive posture or spending that’s good but there is no coherent plan of why things need to be changed.

>We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates.

We'll see how that pans out when the baby boomers finish retiring. Europe ate it's children to feed the retirees.

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-francois-bayrou-wakin...

its

> Most people fantasise with becoming rich, but as in, “I had a rich aunt that I didn’t even meet in my life and I was the sole heir” or “I won the lottery”, not as in “I grinded for the best 10 years of my life working 100 hours per week before I sold my company” that seems more prevalent in the US.

I promise you that within the US, each of those first two fantasies is more popular than the third one.

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