There are plenty of European businesses, our salaries don't grow on trees.
E.g. Germany, the largest EU economy, is very dependent on their car export industry. Guess which industry isn't too hot right now? Do you think you salary will survive the EU losing their export markets? Mine surely will not.
Yet every time the EU tries to enforce regulations so that technological competition becomes actually possible everyone is mad about it.
Tell me another country that competes with the US on monopolistic tech platforms? The only one I know of is China, and that's because their GFW and regulations essentially prevented US platforms from taking hold to begin with, and their stronghold on tech manufacturing means they actually have teeth when it comes to securing concessions from Western techbros (where as the EU couldn't even be bothered to enforce the GDPR).
Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.
Access to VCs and funding is easier in the US. Heck, even if you try to build your own startup, with your own funds, when you're out there looking for investments soon enough being "delaware incorporated" will become a requirement.
What I can tell you from my experience in seeking out venture/angel/seed funding opportunities in the EU is that many (most) that turn up on search results don't have a "pitch us" form and more of a "we'll find you if we want to fund you". There are also incubators, a la YCombinator, that provide only mentorship and no funding (ie. I would need to quit my job and sustain myself to build a startup).
It's not required to compete. It's just their style and old fashioned. A 1 point hitting kids was the way to go. We all know how that went. The world has changed. Those kingdom eras no longer exist. The EU should bring out real substance.
The EU has been regulating the US tech for over a decade. In that time the EU has only fallen further behind.
Meanwhile China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US, while the EU is loosing the one large industry which it has left, manufacturing, to China.
This whole thing is pathetic. Of the goal of the EC ever was the creation of a competitive EU software industry it was a total failure and it was bound to be a total failure. Because what they did were idiotic regulations.
Everything the regulations have accomplished is that trying to compete in the EU puts such an enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed.
China is in this position because of regulations (and technological enforcement of them like GFW), which prevented US tech from taking any significant foothold and left the market available for local competition.
> enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed
Can you tell me which business can't work in the EU? Selling software is legal. Operating a SaaS is legal. Hell, even industrial-scale spyware is legal, as long as you become big quickly enough so that enforcing the GDPR against you becomes counterproductive. The only thing I see that can't be done is industrial-scale corporation-on-consumer fraud, but I don't think we're losing much because of that.
Then the regulations of the EC just fucking sucked and destroyed all chances of the EU ever having a competitive software industry.
Those business-ending GDPR fines HN loves fear-mongering about never materialized. Similarly with the DMA - Apple is still being allowed to stall and wage bureaucratic warfare to not comply.
In contrast, when in China people were found to be using AirDrop's "open to everyone" feature to share content the CCP deemed inappropriate, we quickly got a change where AirDrop would only stay open to everyone for 10 mins before reverting back to "contacts only".
If the EU had the same balls they would give Apple an ultimatum and you'd get alternate browser engines, app stores, and the right to "sideload" overnight.
Who cares about AI. The EU is loosing on everything.
Because while this is true for tech companies, you must consider where that money comes from and how much (more) human suffering goes into it. I'd rather live in society where I make a decent living and people aren't (as) exploited.
edit, to add: I'm exaggerating to make my point clearer, but in these discussions I always get the distinct feeling that if the US still had slavery, American farmers would be making snide remarks about how uncompetitive and anti-business the EU is with all of our pesky regulations.
Meanwhile a vocal minority of European farmers would be pointing at the US, complaining about how much less money they make than American farmers, and pressuring our representatives to legalize slavery because otherwise we're all going to get left behind. In other words it all feels a bit absurd when nobody is considering the negative externalities of these policies.
This was in the context of innovation (or lack thereof), and this being a tech-website then, yes, I'm mostly talking about tech workers. One cannot have (tech) innovation while getting paid 5 to 10 times less (and in many cases I'm being generous to the European employers here) compared to what's happening across the ocean. That's why SAP is still a big thing in Germany and that's why Tesla (and then the Chinese) were able to eat Germany's car-software lunch.