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Comment by jschoe | Hacker News Reader

Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.

Pretty hard economy to survive in.

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US companies seem to sell into Europe just fine?

Amazon, Google, Microsoft - they all make tens of billions of revenue in Europe.

Why wouldn't a company based in Europe be able to do the same?

US companies get big first, only then try Europe once they have big revenue/headcount to handle the risk/complexity.

One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.

EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.

The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.

Here is a subreddit on the topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/

The US started this way... Europe must be careful about how much power is given the EU or it will end up the same way.

Uhhh US companies can do it.

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