"Should a court ever find their licensing or filtering efforts not fierce enough, sites are directly liable for infringements as if they had committed them themselves. This massive threat will lead platforms to over-comply with these rules to stay on the safe side, further worsening the impact on our freedom of speech."
And, lets not forget, This is an enormous liability ripe for legal abuse.
This will be abused by governments and people who dont want something published. For example, here in Spain one of the past presidents wanted to make an anti-meme law as everyone was making fun of him[1]. Luckily we laughed, and he was replaced, but the kind of thing WILL happen now that they have a tool.
What's scary about this to me is any implementation of ContentID will be based in some sort of score way, determining the likelyhood that something is infringing.
These scores would be completely arbitrary, but you should be able to imagine the outcry if it became public that Google set the score for removal to 1000, but if they had set it 5000 would have blocked 5 times more copyrighted material. The public/politicians wouldn't understand these numbers are both made up (and so any difference between them is really meaningless), and would lead to more blocking of legal material.
Big Tech decides regulations are too costly, leaves Europe completely
European bureaucrats: suprised_pikachu.jpg
But seriously, If this does happen I am sure the tech talent can rebuild what left, and that might be better overall for general prosperity, or it might not be, and the crippling cost of compliance shutters new growth. I guess we will soon enough figure out either way.
> Big Tech decides regulations are too costly, leaves Europe completely
That will never be the case as long as Europe has a functioning economy. Look at countries like China -> everyone (Google, Microsoft, Facebook...) wants to get in, although the price to pay is really high.
These fines only affect small/medium sized companies that don't have a strong business in Europe, so it doesn't make any sense for them to get fined.
That's absolutely true. However, there is one thing that isn't mentioned nearly enough - not all European countries (markets?) get the same levels of service.
For example, there is still no iTunes store in my country or Amazon Prime delivery. I can't even sell apps on the Google Play store because my country is not supported. And those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
I'm not sure if you can do that - what you're essentially suggesting is that the EU forces companies to provide their services in certain EU members, whether it makes sense for them or not.
I definitely agree and this is my main point: If Google or others have to fundamentally restructure their business model, or the cost of keeping up with the regulations outweighs the potential upside (and here cost includes all metrics: real cost, opportunity cost), then they will most definitely back out, scale down, offer a reduced service, or worst of all, charge for their software! -- gasp!
In 2011, 33% of all internet traffic went though Google hardware even if it wasn't destined for a Google service. With the rise of Azure, AWS, Compute Engine, etc., I can only imagine that number is a lot worse today.
How seriously could the cloud companies cripple Europe's internet if they all banded together? If they were to block and European traffic though any device they owned...
> How seriously could the cloud companies cripple Europe's internet if they all banded together? If they were to block and European traffic though any device they owned...
That sounds a lot like an internet blockade...and blockades are acts of war:
It is not the government which will intervene but the thousand of companies relying on the cloud vendors. Europe is in average 10% of the world market (just by people).
Well, this would result in them losing a lot of income, being fined heavily, losing all their European staff, capital writeoffs from their European datacentres, and would absolutely guarantee replacement European services appearing.
Why has this fallacy of google blocking europe become so popular? Monopolies cannot flex their muscles in markets that they do not participate in. What do you think will happen to all the competitors that have been pushed back through googles dominance? They will start growing and replace google because thanks to google's leave there will be a huge gap in the market.
As a European I'm perfectly fine with predatory corporations and business practices being outlawed. I'm just grateful for having a government that has my back.
> I'm just grateful for having a government that has my back
Oh sweet summer child...
They will chase away all these "predatory" corporations, and then you are left with staggering numbers of youth unemployment. It's been on average what now, in the range of 20-25% for years now? In some member countries north of 40% like my native land.
If anything the EU should be relaxing regulations to encourage more business growth. There are simply not enough jobs.
Europe should kick out or properly tax all the tech giants operating in its borders. It should also figure out a way to foster local competition for all that large tech companies. I wonder what would happen if they poured a couple of hundred billion dollars into a facebook competitor. Facebook's network effects are legion but their technology is trivial to copy.
Who on earth would raise 200bn in capital? The public sector can't finance private institutions because it's against the EU laws. As a matter of fact a lot of local governments have been fined for supporting big corporations with public funding.
Other than that, VC funding isn't as strong as it is in US and I doubt they give more than 30-40bn in total funds in a year.
I wonder what would happen if they poured a couple of hundred billion dollars into a facebook competitor
1. Europe doesn't have "a couple hundred billion dollars" lying around; do you have any concept of how much that is? 2. Nothing would happen; by the time the project is complete, the world would have moved on. The trick is building out the next revolution, which is exactly what Europe seems to be intent on inhibiting.
Unless you rely on the government to steal for you (green fraud, subsidies, etc) there's no point in trying to do anything in the EU (if you can choose).
I think Europe is dead set on legislating itself into digital irrelevancy. Instead of focusing on the obvious question (why is there not a single European company in the top 15 internet companies?) they're obsessed with finding ways to tax US internet giants as much as they can, in any way they can, without giving a damn about the collateral damage they are causing to their own small businesses in the process.
What should _really_ concern the powers that be is that Europe has become a place to sell things, not make them.
No, that's (arguably - but I'd say yes) one of the rare good ideas. It's stuff like the VAT directive and the new Copyright directive that are the problems.
The Copyright directive in particular - we Europeans often found some comfort in the fact that corporate lobbies don't have nearly as much power in the EU as they do in the US. Sadly, if that directive passes, we won't even have that.
Keep in mind that US companies are selling things in Europe. They're not making them. The cost to create those things are borne somewhere else - so it definitely makes sense to shift profits - otherwise you'd end up in a situation where all those expenses aren't really tax exempt.
> Shouldn't they be paying those taxes in China or the US?
Well for one, Apple contracts out the manufacturing of the products to multiple Chinese companies so I fail to see what taxes on profits they would be paying in China wrt manufacturing.
The EU(~508m ppl) is not the US. Apple have a massive presence in Ireland dealing with everything EU specific from before the products hits the shelves to after they're bought.
> I think Europe is dead set on legislating itself into digital irrelevancy.
> What should _really_ concern the powers that be is that Europe has become a place to sell things, not make them.
Has China legislated itself into digital irrelevancy? Is China just a place to sell things but not make them? It's internet policies are objectively bad in many ways, but they've proven that you don't need to cater to FAANG to have a thriving tech ecosystem.
The tech giants seem to pay no taxes at all in Europe, due to some loopholes they exploit with Ireland. Closing those loopholes seems reasonable, so they can pay their fair taxes as any other business has to do.
The US is a good market to start in. Large, most people speak a common language (English), tons of people on the internet.
Additionally, many of these internet companies are formed from the ashes and exiles of older companies in the US. Valve is founded by former Microsoft employees, Google got Jeff Dean and Sanjay from DEC, etc.
Also, a bunch of money flows from investors who profited off early internet companies in the US, such as the Paypal mafia and Netscape. Investors who want their startups nearby.
Besides what gaogao mentioned, I'd like to mention one other thing - salaries. Just do a comparison between, say, London and San Francisco. And that's before we take into account high taxes most Europeans have to pay on their salaries.
There is not much difference between the two. Sure, healthcare is a lot cheaper than in the US, but most other things are a LOT more expensive in Europe.
Renting a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco costs $3560 per month.
I paid around 800 euros per month for a one bedroom apartment when I moved into the capital region in my country. I've since moved and now I own my own apartment. About 900 euros a month for living expenses and it's 10 m^2 bigger.
I also graduated without any debt, so that's not an expense I have to deal with.
To me, it really seems like US is the expensive option unless I'm buying phones and computers.
Even the most expensive of European cities are cheaper than SF or NY. That's scarce comfort when the difference in rent is 30% but the difference in salaries is 2-3x.
You can't have a top internet company without top notch developers. You can't have top notch developers without paying them what they're worth. The best developers know what they're worth and know what they can get paid in just about every country on earth. I know that right now there's 3 places on earth that I will get paid what I get paid just now for what I do and have a high quality of life - Switzerland, Canada and the United States.
Without top quality developers, you're not going to have a top internet company.
• The culture of incentivising employees with equity stakes is mostly a US thing. It's not widely practiced outside the USA. ARM is a rare example of a British tech firm that gave out equity to early employees, and not coincidentally, ARM was (up until it got bought by the Japanese) one of Europe's tech success stories.
• Lack of a comparable venture capital ecosystem of the type that came out of the success of Silicon Valley.
• The EU single market is (a) relatively new and (b) overhyped. It's still much easier to sell across state lines in the USA than it is to sell to the EU market, for all kinds of reasons. Of course the single market made it a lot easier but still not as easy as when there's a single language, a well established federal-level trading code that's been around hundreds of years etc.
• During the time the big US tech firms were establishing themselves and taking off (the 1980s), Europe was riven with hard socialism and even dictatorships. Spain was a dictatorship up until 1982, and they then elected socialists. France has famously strict labor laws that make it extremely risky and hard to try and grow a startup (which is already risky and hard). Italy was bogged down from the 70s-90s and arguably still today by heavily broken interventionist labour market, and terrorism/political instability. Germany didn't liberalise its labour markets to something approximating US standards until the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s and of course was split in two with one half being another dictatorship until 1991. During the 1980s the UK was busy recovering from a near-fatal economic meltdown caused by confrontations with hard left unions, that had rotating power cuts, three day weeks, garbage piling up on streets and an IMF bailout. Thatcher spent the whole of the 80s trying to bring the UK back to western liberal standards of growth and prosperity, so it wasn't an environment conducive to making a Microsoft or an Apple.
So it's a combination of US style VC fuelled tech ecosystems taking decades to grow, lack of equity-based incentives, most of Europe not having had sufficient political stability during the time companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel etc were becoming established, and large parts of Europe even today still having radically more socialist governments and economies than the USA with the concomitant difficulty of growing any kind of startup at all, let alone high risk/high reward tech startups.
The EU single market is not over-hyped - it's basically non-existent. Of the 28 member states, about 10 or so are actually worth the trouble to do business in (taking into account regulations and taxes, local language and customs, etc).
Most of the rest are more trouble than they're worth and in the best case will merely be a blip on the radar of any business big enough to move into them.
Hmm. I guess there are conflicting sources and views on this. Your page says:
"At its latest, the Transition is said to have ended with the first peaceful transfer of executive power, after the victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the 1982 general election."
That's where I got the date from. I guess I don't consider a country to be democratic until there's been at least one election where the previously elected government agreed to leave.
> "At its latest, the Transition is said to have ended with the first peaceful transfer of executive power, after the victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the 1982 general election."
The Transition, but not the Dictatorship, very different.
I can't speak for the entire European market, but software engineers in the UK are paid pittance compared to the U.S. - even for top shelf engineers with the education, a solid track record and glowing references.
I've been keeping my eye on the UK market for years - the last 20 years to be exact in a bid to consider moving back home. I would have to consider an almost guaranteed 75% pay cut (incl. cost of living adjustment) to move. I have a British passport, I was born and grew up there until I was 25. I have a place to stay in London upon my arrival to help me get set up. I am legally allowed to take any job that would hire me. I still cannot justify the move. It's too much to ask of anyone.
The reason the UK is not the tech giant the U.S. is, is that they don't take developers seriously. Until they stem the tide of developers leaving the UK for a decent income and cost of living, they're never ever going to have what the U.S. has. They don't need to legislate themselves into digital irrelevance, they're already digitally irrelevant, they just need to keep paying developers what they're paying them now.
1. The top companies have finally managed to learn that outsourcing of your product to overseas companies drives the quality of the product into the ground. When you separate your project stakeholders and subject matter experts from your UX and development teams, shit falls to pieces in a hurry.
2. U.S. Tech companies don't give a shit about driving up global salaries, they give a shit about their own success and profits - right now. They already have a team fueling their success and they'd like to keep them close.
They are - I'd say that 90-95% of Croatia's IT companies are focused on serving those needs. I don't think that the situation is much different in most other smaller EU members.
The problem is that high taxes and low tax brackets in Europe - particularly on salaries - are having a strong counter effect. I'm considering moving and I don't even make that much (by US standards, anyway).
Some are. I live in a small, relatively wealthy country in Europe and my friends from Uni are all working for companies that almost exclusively serve US clients.
I’ve heard (not verified) that UK employment law means that it’s impossible to fire people after they have a year of tenure, so they’re reluctant to bring people on and eager to fire before the first year
Well, the UK in general and London in particular are particularly bad, because income (outside banking) is very so-so-ish, cost of living (not just housing, but that in particular) spectacularly high and quality of life (again, housing, commutes, infrastructure, etc.) not so spectacular.
Berlin may have comparable salaries (for me it was actually better, but that was probably specific circumstances), but cost of living is dramatically lower and quality of life dramatically better.
> The reason the UK is not the tech giant the U.S. is, is that they don't take developers seriously
What if we swap the chicken with the egg in that argument:
Maybe UK engineers aren't paid as much as US engineers because UK companies aren't nearly as profitable as US ones?
Another way to phrase that is that UK engineers, in the UK, don't produce as much value as UK engineers do in the US, which is why it makes sense for them to move.
Perhaps Europe doesn't want giant corporations that pay no tax, create a few thousand decent jobs at most, and are in all other ways detrimental to society and all the other workers they employ. It seems to me like the laws are generally created to avoid this kind of predatory, vampiric corporation that Americans love so much in favor of corporations that work for workers rather than corporations that work only for their owners. But who knows? Certainly the lack of giant tech corporations is a feature, not a bug. Who wants a company like Facebook or Amazon that brings very little to society, pays no taxes, and creates very few well paying jobs sucking up resources for its own profit only when they can have an actual competitive economy and marketplace? Perhaps European regulators want to avoid the monopoly and oligopoly that dominate American markets, especially American tech markets.
I'm very, very wary of any corporations that "work in the interest of the workers". What that usually translates into (at least here) is the government subsidizing said corporations with public money. Case in point, a pair of shipyards are making the news because they (yet again) need a bailout in order to continue to function. "Think of the workers", "local business" and such are being thrown around.
I just hope that this time the EU won't let the government waste taxpayer money.
That has nothing to do with it. I'm talking about providing decent wages, vacation, normal working hours, steady jobs, etc. Of course, these laws need to be implemented by the government but it has nothing to do with taking government funding.
All of those things are required by law and apply to local companies and subsidiaries of US tech giants in equal measure, so I'm not quite sure what your point is.
I, for one, would gladly exchange the current menagerie of dysfunctional local companies for FAANG subsidiaries. Microsoft pays some of the highest salaries here, doesn't need regular government bailouts and doesn't depend on rent-seeking to make its profit - which is more than I can say for many businesses here.
I don't think that salary is the driver in Europe that it is in America. People value their life outside of work to a greater degree, and there is less emphasis on getting rich.
The thought of taking a job with twice the salary but a third of the vacation is pretty awful to me and most of my tech friends.
Unless you are one of the founders or investors, there is little reason to rejoice in the current valuations of American tech companies. It has little to do with innovation and a lot to do with extremely lax regulation. What the world needs from tech is not just better AI or drones. The world needs tech to be regulated, and Europe, not the US, is currently providing more regulatory innovations:
- how do we curb the emergence of giant tech corporations with finances the size of nation states that literally threatens democracies through lobbying and fake news? The US was there a hundred years ago with antitrust regulation but it seems like the US is not enforcing antitrust law anymore
- how do we make those giant tech corporations pay fair share of tax? Again, the US used to tax it's corporations, but when it comes to tech, the US seems content with letting them hide their income in foreign tax shelters
- how do we protect content creators like journalists from the giant tech corporations' completely free consumption of their work?
- how do we regulate the so called "sharing economy" so that highly regulated industries such as hotels and taxis are not met with unfair competition by companies who's main innovation seems to be that they don't follow rules?
I'm not rejoicing. I'm merely pointing out that, at least for me (and I dare say - most of Europeans that don't live in comfy western economies) is that most regulations are not all that important issues. They're more concerned over high taxes, poor public services, a mediocre economy and various societal issues (corruption, demographic collapse, lack of long-term economic planning...).
As a person running a small business, I don't see these motions by the EU as "sticking up for the little guy" or looking out for local businesses. I see them as just more things to think about as I try to keep my business running and growing.
Furthermore, I see a lot of talk about tax and fairness. I don't see a lot of talk about how that money is spent or what the benefits of running a European company are.
Privacy protections become more and more relevant with the ubiquity of information that companies process, store and share. Sure it adds work for companies, but that is a preferable trade off to the alternative. GDPR won't make the difference between a company being a large global player or not.
Similarly, taxing companies that go to every possible extent to avoid it and hardly pay any taxes even though they are some of the largest companies in the world is hardly being "obsessed with finding ways to tax US internet giants as much as they can".
I think a large reason for the lack of large European IT companies is the language and small/segmented markets problem.
It's natural to start with your home country/market since that is were you are, were you have market insight, connections to get things going, .... But in Europe you have many countries with different languages, different currencies, tax schemes, regulations, and very different levels of income and prosperity.
Expansion / internationalization is often a very cumbersome step by step process.
Compared to the US where you have a large demographic with a single language, somewhat more unified regulation, and a big ecosystem of startups, things are a lot more challenging.
Stricter employment protection and regulation in general, and the lack of the achievement and entrepreneurial culture certainly play a role though.
GDPR compliance is expensive to implement correctly. It's more about data regulation than privacy. It hurts small startup firms who don't have the resources or time, and rewards large companies that do.
Big tech has nothing to fear at all. Europe is waging an all out war on companies/entrepreneurship of every size. Big tech will probably face massive losses. On the other hand, a bootstrapped company/MicroISV or whatever you want to call it these days will not face any loss, because it would have been legislated out of even being born. So big tech will probably be secretly cheering on the greater chance of establishing monopoly.
85 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 402 ms ] threadIf they mean Article 13, that law benefits big companies, and big companies only.
A good overview:
- https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/eu-copyright-final-text/
- https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/
And, lets not forget, This is an enormous liability ripe for legal abuse.
[1] https://www.rt.com/news/366642-spain-meme-ban-backlash/
Edit: spelling
These scores would be completely arbitrary, but you should be able to imagine the outcry if it became public that Google set the score for removal to 1000, but if they had set it 5000 would have blocked 5 times more copyrighted material. The public/politicians wouldn't understand these numbers are both made up (and so any difference between them is really meaningless), and would lead to more blocking of legal material.
Big Tech decides regulations are too costly, leaves Europe completely
European bureaucrats: suprised_pikachu.jpg
But seriously, If this does happen I am sure the tech talent can rebuild what left, and that might be better overall for general prosperity, or it might not be, and the crippling cost of compliance shutters new growth. I guess we will soon enough figure out either way.
That will never be the case as long as Europe has a functioning economy. Look at countries like China -> everyone (Google, Microsoft, Facebook...) wants to get in, although the price to pay is really high.
These fines only affect small/medium sized companies that don't have a strong business in Europe, so it doesn't make any sense for them to get fined.
For example, there is still no iTunes store in my country or Amazon Prime delivery. I can't even sell apps on the Google Play store because my country is not supported. And those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.
I definitely agree and this is my main point: If Google or others have to fundamentally restructure their business model, or the cost of keeping up with the regulations outweighs the potential upside (and here cost includes all metrics: real cost, opportunity cost), then they will most definitely back out, scale down, offer a reduced service, or worst of all, charge for their software! -- gasp!
How seriously could the cloud companies cripple Europe's internet if they all banded together? If they were to block and European traffic though any device they owned...
That sounds a lot like an internet blockade...and blockades are acts of war:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/blockade-warfare
I'm sure the US Government would have something to say to companies that decided to wage a kind of private war on allied nations.
Oh sweet summer child...
They will chase away all these "predatory" corporations, and then you are left with staggering numbers of youth unemployment. It's been on average what now, in the range of 20-25% for years now? In some member countries north of 40% like my native land.
If anything the EU should be relaxing regulations to encourage more business growth. There are simply not enough jobs.
Other than that, VC funding isn't as strong as it is in US and I doubt they give more than 30-40bn in total funds in a year.
This isn't actually true.
This would require a radical, top-to-bottom reorganization of the entire European political structure. Not gonna happen.
I wonder what would happen if they poured a couple of hundred billion dollars into a facebook competitor
1. Europe doesn't have "a couple hundred billion dollars" lying around; do you have any concept of how much that is? 2. Nothing would happen; by the time the project is complete, the world would have moved on. The trick is building out the next revolution, which is exactly what Europe seems to be intent on inhibiting.
Unless you rely on the government to steal for you (green fraud, subsidies, etc) there's no point in trying to do anything in the EU (if you can choose).
What should _really_ concern the powers that be is that Europe has become a place to sell things, not make them.
Just because the EU passed privacy regulations?
The Copyright directive in particular - we Europeans often found some comfort in the fact that corporate lobbies don't have nearly as much power in the EU as they do in the US. Sadly, if that directive passes, we won't even have that.
Er, no. Just to tax them at all. US companies have been completely dodging paying taxes in Europe (effective tax rates of <1% on billions of profits).
Shouldn't they be paying those taxes in China or the US?
Well for one, Apple contracts out the manufacturing of the products to multiple Chinese companies so I fail to see what taxes on profits they would be paying in China wrt manufacturing.
The EU(~508m ppl) is not the US. Apple have a massive presence in Ireland dealing with everything EU specific from before the products hits the shelves to after they're bought.
It still wouldn't be getting any more tax money if Apple was paying more tax in the US rather than stashing it away in tax havens.
> What should _really_ concern the powers that be is that Europe has become a place to sell things, not make them.
Has China legislated itself into digital irrelevancy? Is China just a place to sell things but not make them? It's internet policies are objectively bad in many ways, but they've proven that you don't need to cater to FAANG to have a thriving tech ecosystem.
I'm curious about that too. Anyone have a good answer as to why there isn't at least 1 by now?
Additionally, many of these internet companies are formed from the ashes and exiles of older companies in the US. Valve is founded by former Microsoft employees, Google got Jeff Dean and Sanjay from DEC, etc.
Also, a bunch of money flows from investors who profited off early internet companies in the US, such as the Paypal mafia and Netscape. Investors who want their startups nearby.
I paid around 800 euros per month for a one bedroom apartment when I moved into the capital region in my country. I've since moved and now I own my own apartment. About 900 euros a month for living expenses and it's 10 m^2 bigger.
I also graduated without any debt, so that's not an expense I have to deal with.
To me, it really seems like US is the expensive option unless I'm buying phones and computers.
Without top quality developers, you're not going to have a top internet company.
• The culture of incentivising employees with equity stakes is mostly a US thing. It's not widely practiced outside the USA. ARM is a rare example of a British tech firm that gave out equity to early employees, and not coincidentally, ARM was (up until it got bought by the Japanese) one of Europe's tech success stories.
• Lack of a comparable venture capital ecosystem of the type that came out of the success of Silicon Valley.
• The EU single market is (a) relatively new and (b) overhyped. It's still much easier to sell across state lines in the USA than it is to sell to the EU market, for all kinds of reasons. Of course the single market made it a lot easier but still not as easy as when there's a single language, a well established federal-level trading code that's been around hundreds of years etc.
• During the time the big US tech firms were establishing themselves and taking off (the 1980s), Europe was riven with hard socialism and even dictatorships. Spain was a dictatorship up until 1982, and they then elected socialists. France has famously strict labor laws that make it extremely risky and hard to try and grow a startup (which is already risky and hard). Italy was bogged down from the 70s-90s and arguably still today by heavily broken interventionist labour market, and terrorism/political instability. Germany didn't liberalise its labour markets to something approximating US standards until the Hartz IV reforms in the early 2000s and of course was split in two with one half being another dictatorship until 1991. During the 1980s the UK was busy recovering from a near-fatal economic meltdown caused by confrontations with hard left unions, that had rotating power cuts, three day weeks, garbage piling up on streets and an IMF bailout. Thatcher spent the whole of the 80s trying to bring the UK back to western liberal standards of growth and prosperity, so it wasn't an environment conducive to making a Microsoft or an Apple.
So it's a combination of US style VC fuelled tech ecosystems taking decades to grow, lack of equity-based incentives, most of Europe not having had sufficient political stability during the time companies like Apple, Microsoft, Intel etc were becoming established, and large parts of Europe even today still having radically more socialist governments and economies than the USA with the concomitant difficulty of growing any kind of startup at all, let alone high risk/high reward tech startups.
Most of the rest are more trouble than they're worth and in the best case will merely be a blip on the radar of any business big enough to move into them.
Nope, the dictator died in 1975, and there were free elections in 1977 (won by the center-right, not the socialists) and ever since (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...).
"At its latest, the Transition is said to have ended with the first peaceful transfer of executive power, after the victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the 1982 general election."
That's where I got the date from. I guess I don't consider a country to be democratic until there's been at least one election where the previously elected government agreed to leave.
The Transition, but not the Dictatorship, very different.
EDIT: original reply way too turgid
I've been keeping my eye on the UK market for years - the last 20 years to be exact in a bid to consider moving back home. I would have to consider an almost guaranteed 75% pay cut (incl. cost of living adjustment) to move. I have a British passport, I was born and grew up there until I was 25. I have a place to stay in London upon my arrival to help me get set up. I am legally allowed to take any job that would hire me. I still cannot justify the move. It's too much to ask of anyone.
The reason the UK is not the tech giant the U.S. is, is that they don't take developers seriously. Until they stem the tide of developers leaving the UK for a decent income and cost of living, they're never ever going to have what the U.S. has. They don't need to legislate themselves into digital irrelevance, they're already digitally irrelevant, they just need to keep paying developers what they're paying them now.
1. The top companies have finally managed to learn that outsourcing of your product to overseas companies drives the quality of the product into the ground. When you separate your project stakeholders and subject matter experts from your UX and development teams, shit falls to pieces in a hurry.
2. U.S. Tech companies don't give a shit about driving up global salaries, they give a shit about their own success and profits - right now. They already have a team fueling their success and they'd like to keep them close.
Outsouring to high-quality Indian firms, or to British/Euro firms, doesn't.
The problem is that high taxes and low tax brackets in Europe - particularly on salaries - are having a strong counter effect. I'm considering moving and I don't even make that much (by US standards, anyway).
Berlin may have comparable salaries (for me it was actually better, but that was probably specific circumstances), but cost of living is dramatically lower and quality of life dramatically better.
What if we swap the chicken with the egg in that argument:
Maybe UK engineers aren't paid as much as US engineers because UK companies aren't nearly as profitable as US ones?
Another way to phrase that is that UK engineers, in the UK, don't produce as much value as UK engineers do in the US, which is why it makes sense for them to move.
I just hope that this time the EU won't let the government waste taxpayer money.
I, for one, would gladly exchange the current menagerie of dysfunctional local companies for FAANG subsidiaries. Microsoft pays some of the highest salaries here, doesn't need regular government bailouts and doesn't depend on rent-seeking to make its profit - which is more than I can say for many businesses here.
The thought of taking a job with twice the salary but a third of the vacation is pretty awful to me and most of my tech friends.
- how do we curb the emergence of giant tech corporations with finances the size of nation states that literally threatens democracies through lobbying and fake news? The US was there a hundred years ago with antitrust regulation but it seems like the US is not enforcing antitrust law anymore
- how do we make those giant tech corporations pay fair share of tax? Again, the US used to tax it's corporations, but when it comes to tech, the US seems content with letting them hide their income in foreign tax shelters
- how do we protect content creators like journalists from the giant tech corporations' completely free consumption of their work?
- how do we regulate the so called "sharing economy" so that highly regulated industries such as hotels and taxis are not met with unfair competition by companies who's main innovation seems to be that they don't follow rules?
- how do we secure the privacy of citizens?
As a person running a small business, I don't see these motions by the EU as "sticking up for the little guy" or looking out for local businesses. I see them as just more things to think about as I try to keep my business running and growing.
Furthermore, I see a lot of talk about tax and fairness. I don't see a lot of talk about how that money is spent or what the benefits of running a European company are.
I don't know, but this problem easily generalizes _all_ giant corporations.
Similarly, taxing companies that go to every possible extent to avoid it and hardly pay any taxes even though they are some of the largest companies in the world is hardly being "obsessed with finding ways to tax US internet giants as much as they can".
I think a large reason for the lack of large European IT companies is the language and small/segmented markets problem.
It's natural to start with your home country/market since that is were you are, were you have market insight, connections to get things going, .... But in Europe you have many countries with different languages, different currencies, tax schemes, regulations, and very different levels of income and prosperity. Expansion / internationalization is often a very cumbersome step by step process.
Compared to the US where you have a large demographic with a single language, somewhat more unified regulation, and a big ecosystem of startups, things are a lot more challenging.
Stricter employment protection and regulation in general, and the lack of the achievement and entrepreneurial culture certainly play a role though.
It's really not unless your business model involves selling data.
We don't sell data, We make things which we sell to people.
GDPR was a pain in that it was work we didn't previously have to do but it wasn't hard to comply with.
FWIW I'm completely in favour of it as well, it's about damn time.
It was and is much more expensive for the big companies and established players.
Only use the data that you need, and you’re 90% GDPR compliant. The other 10% is making sure that you can delete data.
If your startup relies on sending private data to hundreds of ad agencies and trackers, for example, it’s a good thing your startup struggles.