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Comment by mvanbaak | Hacker News Reader

> and protect / stimulate domestic alternatives.

I really would love to see this, but the sad truth is that there are no real alternatives for a very big amount of software products. In the end, the eu residents will simply have to pay more for a lot of software products, and that's it :(

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That's the initial impact, it's exactly the incentive that over time will create native competitors.

Yeah, there will be immediate pain but if EU competitors can spring up because the American software giants are disadvantaged it'll slowly erode the reliance on US's software.

I think that consumers will try to avoid the pain, and use vpns and fake addresses to get around the tariffs etc. The whole problem is that the EU is not providing an environment where software vendors can go as fast as the vendors in the US. This is not just a matter of regulations. It's the whole mindset that is too conservative to go fast. The whole 'throw 1000 things at the wall and see what sticks' is not something we europeans are used to.

> This is not just a matter of regulations. It's the whole mindset that is too conservative to go fast. The whole 'throw 1000 things at the wall and see what sticks' is not something we europeans are used to.

It's also a matter of two advantages the USA has:

1. being a homogeneous market culturally-linguistic, there are dozens of countries with very different cultures and languages in Europe, it's not as easy to scale continent-wide as it is to scale country-wide in the USA.

2. exhuberant privilege of the USD, it gives a major advantage on capital markets where capital is sloshing around in the economy, it's much easier to find billions of USD parked somewhere wanting to get better returns. The EU doesn't have this privilege, investments need to be more conservative.

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