Launching anything as a big tech company in Europe is an absolute nightmare. Between GDPR, DSA, DMA and in Google's case, several EC remedies, it takes months to years to get anything launched.
While that's usually my line too, in this case it's also a nightmare if you're selling access to an AI and it unexpectedly starts barfing up EU citizens' private data verbatim that 'somehow' ended up in the training set.
It's a nightmare for anyone that isn't a tiny startup that flies under the radar. See: shocking lack of global-scale innovative companies made in Europe.
Language barriers and local markets. 95% startups here build things for local markets and fail to scale to the global ones. In the meantime US startups scale to ~1bn people almost instantly.
That and the labor laws and very strict compared to the US. We have an office in Poland due to regulations most "employees" want to be contractors, this is due to a tax advantage / national healthcare I think. That said the offices in the US don't say it out loud, but in the EU seem to take a week off every other month for something.
At the end of the day, the employees have a much cushier life-work balance. You can argue (rightfully) that that's better for the people and society, but it also means it's harder for companies to succeed.
Being contractors is Poland - that’s because of the taxes exactly, not regulations per se.
Contractors get taxed 19% flat rate and a small% for health insurance (even less in IT - 9%?). Whereas full time workers get taxed similarly to people in the west.
Yeah having privacy protections for everyone really hurts us… Someone releases something shiny so we should just allow them to harvest personal data and manipulate markets so we get access to it… not really a society I think most giants want to live in. I prefer waiting a bit but knowing that Google needs to play on a bit more even field over here. Plus none of the GDPR or DMA are that bad. Just make sure you comply and get it over with. It’s not that hard to build a privacy centric product that doesn’t steal my data.
On 2 yeah it does. Seems like the UK keeps falling behind on everything now that it lives in the shadow of the continent and can’t seem to create any value and nobody cares about that market. So much for the MaSiVe TraDe DeALZ we were getting unlocked…
> Just make sure you comply and get it over with. It’s not that hard to build a privacy centric product that doesn’t steal my data.
Eh, given that Europe struggles to build anything tech related, I'm going to say it's pretty hard. Far easier to make overpriced luxury handbags and the like.
Aside from, you know, most likely making the machines required to build the computer you're spewing the xenophobia on, and countless other examples that aren't making tech as simple as websites.
The anti-European gloating on HN is getting tiresome, and imho is a pretty big blind spot of HN moderation.
I think it's very exaggerated to call this xenophobia and suggest it needs to be moderated. OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury. This isn't xenophobic - it's true.
> I think it's very exaggerated to call this xenophobia
I'm also not quite sure it's xenophobia, but it's something other than calm and rational. Whenever Europe comes up in a HN thread, there's a sudden glut of snide comments and gloating, as if people are desperate for themselves and others to believe their layoffs-stricken industry is amazing nonetheless. Maybe to distract themselves from the mandatory RTO bad news?
Rather than calling it xenophobia, let me call it adversarial, and it's always the same side initiating it. Very, very tiresome.
I'm also willing to bet a very high % of the same demo would readily call HN an explicitly American forum and that inclusiveness or being welcoming to others shouldn't be a priority of the site, which I personally find just sort of jarring anywhere on the web, since https doesn't know borders and I grew up in the very overtly international FOSS community as an engineer. You know, where we make that Linux thing you probably have ten copies of on devices around you right now that started in Finland.
> OP said Europe struggles to make tech, and focuses more on luxury.
Only for a very narrow definition of "tech" that doesn't include the vast majority of engineering disciplines, as well as basic research and the education that enables the "tech".
I will take, for example, BioNTech over most startups posted on HN, and I'd rather we build another ITER than another Twitter clone.
Your bio says you're an R programmer. Are you aware the R foundation is a European (Austrian) org, like most organized open source? Seems those Europeans have quite a bit of time for tech after all.
A startup doesn't have the same target of its back as a large publicly traded corporation. It also has a different culture and is expected to take risks that non-startups aren't. In other words, not an apples-to-apples comparison.
> The legal cost of dealing with a few _mistaken_ (or fake) GDPR complaints can wipe you out.
No, they can't. It's not an automated system that automagically fines companies if they get flooded by fake emails or whatever, they're pretty reasonable most of the time and you get given plenty of chances to work with regulators before they decide to fine you even a single euro (assuming you're guilty in the first place). Even if you get fined, they're usually scaled to the severity of the offense as well as the company's size.
Plus the solution is super simple, just don't invasively track your users without consent! I love that I can use the GDPR to tell my manager to fuck off when he talks about using some invasive tracking bullshit on our users, I'm glad it's there.
I'm not sure if this[0] is the most up-to-date list (I've seen a number of these lists), but take a look yourself. Most of these fines are tiny, certainly not earth shattering for any company of any size with any stability.
And if your business can't survive the financial burden of complying with GDPR, then good. There's no reason for a small business to even be violating it in the first place, since we've had about a decade of forewarning at this point regarding these privacy laws.
