I'm a European, living in Europe, developing software. Lack of imagination is not our problem. It's so good that we supply our best talent to the US where it does extremely well revolutionizing AI, designing hardware for Apple, developing games, stream online music, etc. E.g. Amazon's CTO is Dutch. Basically the person that has been running AWS. The people and the education system are fine.<p>Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to build successful startups here. People do start companies here but more often than not success is followed by US investment and before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.<p>A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.<p>That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a thing there too between states). And that's before you consider language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small country means you barely have enough to expand to another small country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization, understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc. Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.
I take offense at such massive overgeneralizations as "Europe lacks imagination."<p>What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of hundred actually are successful. This kills business models which cannot show any profit whatsoever, and a large portion of the remainder are killed by data regulations forbidding "alternate paths of monetization" (to put it charitably.)<p>Rather, a problem is that once a European project becomes successful enough, it soon becomes an American project, either by acquisition or by moving to where the investment money is.
This problem will never get fixed. The author forgot to mention in depth the main reason why EU isn't even in the game: culture.<p>In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.<p>A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for the quality of life, come from a third world country, and I see how kids and adults are spoiled here. Much of what they have was just given to them. At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company out of the market no matter what.<p>I find for me more likely to save some money, move to my country and create my own business and sell in Europe. People here are too lazy to compete in the fast world we live in, there in my country there is so many skilled people, so little capital, here is the reverse. Good amount of capital and foreigners working in tech. For instance, I live in Berlin and almost all the "working people" from tech companies here are foreigners. Germans are generally the executives and/or management. It is quite rare to find a german software developer on Startups.<p>I personally think(my opinion, not the ultimate truth)... that Europe is definitely a very interesting market for companies to come here and sell their stuff, but not to make it.<p>Instead I think Europe should focus on its strengths, which is healthy market regulations, creating a good playing field for companies from above, rather on its weaknesses. It should also figure out a way to keep part of the profits inside the continent to benefits its inhabitants.<p>More important than competing is to know where and when to compete.
Tech innovation, once it has resulted in sufficient financial advantage becomes a 'winner takes all' game, where the people that won the previous round have a better than average chance of winning all subsequent rounds as well until there is some outside imposed limit. They are either able to throw more resources at the same problem or they can afford to buy out the successes elsewhere and claim them as their own.<p>The same argument could be made about the European film scene (check out how many Hollywood blockbusters are remakes of great European movies), the European music scene and the European literature scene to greater or lesser degree.<p>But you know what? It's fine. There is plenty of quality software in Europe, and as long as those companies don't get bought out by the handful of runaway American successes they can grow and do just fine. They tend to be better at customer service, they tend to be better at addressing multi-lingual markets at an earlier stage in their development than their American counterparts and they are active in important fields.<p>The thing that America excels at is advertising and simply making money. But there is more than that in this world.
<i>If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but to develop better software, and to also offer that for free.</i><p>I can’t help thinking of Qwant, the alternative privacy-aware European search engine. Their financial standing is so dire that this week they had to ask money from Huawei. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/french-search-engine-qwant-huawei-bailout-loan/" rel="nofollow">https://www.politico.eu/article/french-search-engine-qwant-h...</a>
Hot take: the problems here are cultural.<p>Consider these data points:<p>1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.<p>But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.<p>The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.<p>2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.<p>3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.<p>4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.<p>5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.<p>For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.<p>EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
> For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch something without knowing how it might eventually make money<p>I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company. In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer, in others you need to setup a sole proprietorship, in others the distinction is not that clear. In almost every country in Europe (perhaps with the exception of the UK) the whole process is cumbersome. Young people who are willing to launch some projects online don't want to mess up with taxes authorities nor lawyers nor the commerce chamber... and hence they decide not to launch anything at all. Besides, setting up a company costs money (perhaps not much).<p>I live in Europe. I don't want to setup a damn company for every little project I may think it can become big. I want to let my projects grow in the wild, and if any of them get traction then sure, I will setup a company without fear of losing money.<p>Also: being a software engineer/computer programmer in Europe is not as sexy as it is in USA. It's getting better, yes, but here the "engineer" is the last monkey. Managers and sales are the ones who get the credit. So, European mentality also plays a role here.
Once again, proof that no good deed goes unpunished. It's a credit to
Europe's social values that they find themselves prey to the profit-first
institutions of Silicon Valley. And lest we forget, the world-changing
beneficence of the internet and Linux originated from a Swiss lab and a Finn.
We have to operate by american rules in the hope that something will catch on, and then pray european countries won't create legislation that outlaws or makes it impossible to monetize your product. Schemes like the H2020 research grants are more of a UBI for Phd holders than a real attempt to outcompete the world. I don't think any funding scheme coming from the EU can be competitive, instead of a job-and-bureaucracy-creation machine.<p>Europe lacks on marketing, distribution and ability to acquire and lock-in users, fast. This has been the american recipe to success time and again, not the quality of consumer-facing products which has been going downhill for a decade now. We can't bet on EU as a whole to create an ecosystem, instead the best use of EU funds would be for states to run the most basic consumer services for free for their citizens (such as email or a mastodon instance). It will be sub-par but it will at least create an alternative due to the EU's large distribution mechanism.
Patrick Collison replying to an Economist Article that is pessimistic about European Tech Future:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1403340409787469836" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1403340409787469836</a>
My previous comment on this issue: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27508759" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27508759</a><p>(Slightly edited) copy-paste:<p>Economist ran an article on this: <a href="https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora</a>...<p>We're in the service economy now, and Europe has no real single market for services, due to all kinds of national regulations that differ throughout the block. Nor does it have well-developed financial and labor markets, partly also because they are currently partitioned by nationality. Its stock exchanges are too many and too small, etc. The list goes on.<p>For many big European companies, an astounding percentage of revenue comes from the US or China. But if you start a startup building for US/China from the start, why would you want the HQ to be somewhere in Europe?<p>This also means that the story is very very different for products that can be shipped in boxes. Europe does extremely well in cars, beverages, clothing, chemicals and that sort of thing. Also electrical utilities for some reason.
Although the EU is a marketplace of 27 countries, it is not a digitally homogeneous marketplace. Adoption and acceptance of digital tools varies by country. Language is also important - the tech giants localise their apps and tools. But many software companies in larger European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain etc) concentrate on their home country first before they focus on international reach. That makes sense. In smaller countries, where the software market is also smaller, software companies have a more international outlook.<p>I am struggling to think of European success stories in the traditional desktop app space - apps that have <i>international reach and name recognition</i>. I can only think of a handful desktop apps:<p>- <i>Sketch</i> (Netherlands)<p>- <i>Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher</i> (UK)<p>- <i>Cinema4D</i> (Germany)<p>Who else enjoys international success for their desktop apps? What about SaaS?<p>The apps above specialise in a particluar field (design and 3D animation), but missing are any apps in the "office productivity" category which seem completely dominated by tech giants like Microsoft and Google.<p>Note: I purposely did not mention SAP because no-one looks to SAP as a source of inspiration. Their enterprise apps are expensive and clunky.
Living in EU. Can only say, the main reason is in my perspective regulatory and taxes. Some points<p>- It is difficult to issue equity and get equity (tax)<p>- Each EU country has different taxes. You are taxed lower in Netherlands than in Germany.<p>- Each country has different regulation rules. If you do something exciting. Wow let's say a social network. You would be killed by regulation and data privacy rules. Autonomous driving the same. Blockchain forget it.<p>- Ideology driven investments. Maybe just a feeling. But nearly on each event green energy seems to be the hot topic. It is kind of political driven. Like everyone should jump on the green energy train. It is harder to get funding for more exotic topics...
I must say that I lack the Scandinavian/Baltic perspective here. Some successful software projects founded in Scandinavia and the Baltics some of you have heard of include:<p>Linux
Skype
Spotify
Mojang (Minecraft)
Rovio (Angry Birds)
SoundCloud
Klarna
MySQL
Opera
Qt<p>Even Tidal, Rdio and Beats Music can trace their ancestry to this region.<p>Not to mention the only(?) remaining competition to Chinese telecom, Ericsson and Nokia, following the defeat of Lucent, Nortel, Siemens et al.<p>With this perspective, perhaps it can be argued that speaking of Europe as a whole in this sense is unproductive.
Some of the stuff in this article may be fine, and trying to raise money is certainly harder in Europe, but I thought one of the biggest drags on Europe's tech industry is poor pay for engineers and other tech talent?<p>In the U.S., going into a tech career can be one of the best ways to make a high salary quickly -- especially without needing an advanced degree. Without this incentive, you'll have a lot less people pursuing education and careers in these areas.<p>A software engineer makes like 50% more salary (let alone all of the other stuff) in the Bay Area as they do in London. London is a really expensive city that pays certain industries a ton of money.
I think a law that forbids blocking third party clients (either through terms&conditions or technical means) would level the playing field a bit. Though I see issues around balancing the need of platforms to update their APIs and an API update essentially blocking third party clients who don't keep pace.
Am I the only one who thinks this is not a problem but just how things should be in general? Why should people be pushed to work themselves to death due to societal/financial pressure? If the work culture in Europe provides less stressful life and better work-life balance, barring those who are career driven/ambitious/enjoy the associated challenges, it should be perfectly ok to embrace the former without being guilt-shamed by the latter. I don't have stats but I think the percentage of people who enjoy their work but not as much so as to slow-march to their deaths to the tunes of never-ending deadlines, isn't insignificant.
The EU should just pay anybody who makes Open Source contributions.<p>Problem solved.<p>Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is externalized.
> what Europe also doesn't have is a true single market. It has fractured markets, each with a different language, different legal requirements and so on.<p>I agree with this from a commenter below. In US you have so many more customers that speak your language and have your culture. You can move around and find common issues. One government. One law. So different from the EU.<p>I do not see a fix until government, law and language becomes unified to a common government, common law and the common language.
United States' platforms on Chinese hardware sounds like everybody's problem. Except for China which has both.<p>To be honest, it would be nice for Europe to handle the platforms and for the United States to go back to radical innovation. The times of emacs, vi, Bell labs, Xerox and pushing the computing medium to the edge.
I think the author's reasoning that the entire continent of Europe lacks imagination was a major weakness of this article, and perhaps unintentionally some kind of -ist or -ism.
Anecdotally, many of the brightest American software developers I've met hail from Europe: UK, Greece, Russia, Serbia, Italy, etc. I can go on and on and think of many geniuses I've had the privilege to work with.
The question that people should be asking is why do the best and brightest often tend to migrate to American companies?
My personal perspective on why European software doesn't seem to ever become market leading boils down to their government culture of wanting to regulate almost everything.
Software is a world of possibilities. You can start from nothing and code literally anything.
To me, the European tendency to want to have government regulate that and confine you to a narrow box of allowed services stifles that. Anybody who has a unique idea (unique ideas always step you outside of the box of existing regulated services) is going to be hampered.
To give an example: something as simple as their Cookie law, which no doubt started with good intentions, just makes the first impression with any European website ugly and focuses away from the actual product. Does anybody really not know what a cookie is by now? Seriously?
The problem is not the lack of imagination, quite the opposite in fact, but the lack people willing to pay the software workers, and the absence of investors that literally launch money at every startup just because they like playing the "tech lottery".<p>European businessmans are in general very cunning and old fashioned, they don't like sharing their profits with their employees or with othere people in general.<p>We get to life a relatively quiet and relaxed life, but for an employee or for a young tech enterpreneur is impossibile to make nearly as much as in the US, because the "hot jobs" here in europe are not in the tech space but in the "old space": attorneys, bureucreats, medics, church people, politics, and so on. Obviously a lot of tech workers make the switch for the US or other countries.<p>Source: i live in Italy where a senior top-level engineer makes 40k euros/year gross, a self-employed medical doctor specialized on foot diseases makes 100/200 euros/30 minutes, evading taxes 80% of the time.
Fyi... a related 11 minute video from a Hungarian on why Europe doesn't have many big consumer-facing tech startups: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk</a>
If the goal is trustworthy software then just write and host trustworthy software.<p>If the goal is to have a thriving economy based on writing and hosting trustworthy software then it's going to need subsidies; it costs more to pay for high quality software written by engineers protected by strong labor laws than it does to pay Silicon Valley rates with RSUs complicit in large-scale data gathering and exploitation.<p>Ironically in economic terms Europe (the EU and Ireland specifically) already hosts a huge fraction of FAANG profits and IP ownership/licensing due to double-Irish arrangements. They just offshore the development to the U.S. So mission accomplished I guess?
The author's explanation for the lack of european tech companies is that almost all software relies on business models other then charging money, and for various reasons european companies aren't able to use these business models. This doesn't seem sufficient. For three of the five big US tech companies - Microsoft, Apple and Amazon - the main business model is charging money. If the author's explanation is correct, these companies could could just as well have been founded in europe, yet no company even approaching their power and influence has been.
Absolutely agreed. I'm bewildered about how entrenched Windows and Office is, for one - in government and in schools. How the hell can they put so much control into an other entity like this? Especially if there are fine alternatives, although I agree that large migrations are really, really painful. France, for some reason, has a higher frequency in news regarding adoption of free software, for example the adoption of Matrix [0], LibreOffice [1] or Framasoft's activity in the education [2]. This gives me some hope.<p>[0] <a href="https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed-as-the-basis-for-frances-secure-instant-messenger-app" rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://itsfoss.com/french-city-toulouse-saved-1-million-euro-libreoffice/" rel="nofollow">https://itsfoss.com/french-city-toulouse-saved-1-million-eur...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://framasoft.org/en/" rel="nofollow">https://framasoft.org/en/</a>
> If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but to develop better software,<p>NEVER in my 30+ years as a user of computer networks or communication programs I have seen the "better software" win. It has always been the most marketing, the most shady ethics, or anything else that lead to the strongest network effect.
Another "poor Europe, too scared, too insular, too antiquated" article. I wish my trends site still worked since this seems to be a bit of a theme recently.<p>Something is out of whack about the priorities here. Yes America has FANGS and is at the cutting edge of slinging ads and casino style VC culture. But have you seen the state of US banking and payments infrastructure? Plaid is pretty much cutting edge for god's sake. The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny.<p>Things like GDPR and OpenBanking point to an alternative way of doing technology, that to my value set is better than the ability to inflate ridiculous Uber/WeWork/etc. valuations with no correlation to real world value.
At least in Belgium, a very large fraction (perhaps even the majority) of software developers works for the government or for banks. It goes without saying that neither governments nor banks are exactly known for developing great software, or for marketing it ...
As a foreigner in France... Several things seem very anti-startup. Despite having a cool StationF co-working place.<p>In France (Paris) its impossible to rent without earning 3 times your rent in after tax salary.<p>Lots of decent programmers - but if you hire them its very hard (impossible) to lay them off on a employment contract.<p>If you don't give them an employment contract they can't rent an apartment.<p>As a Director you can be held personally responsible (no corporate protection) from non salary payment or other debts.<p>It is very complex to give shares or options to your employees without large tax implications.<p>result? StationF is mostly large companies. When you hire people you really need the help of a lawyer to protect yourself.
As a European Software Product Manager in a as some would refer to as „old school company selling hardware/physical products“ (not electronic), I think the article misses to say that if we combine our hardware expertise with software we are very easily ahead of software only competitors.<p>Yes, we definitively need to overcome our software problem but we have unique assets, that if accessible only in combination europe can overcome that problem. Example: High end hardware equipment, chemicals etc. we failed to have the customer facing software platform but we‘ll get there and instead of selling ads we will create combination products. Think IKEA or VW etc
PG has a related essay: Why Startups Condense in America<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html</a><p>He actually has several essays on how to try to create a Silicon Valley in other geographic areas, but this seemed the most relevant.<p>tldr:<p>1. The US Allows Immigration.<p>2. The US Is a Rich Country.<p>3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.<p>4. American Universities Are Better.<p>5. You Can Fire People in America.<p>6. In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.<p>7. America Is Not Too Fussy. (If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can assume larval startups will break most of them, because they don't know what the laws are and don't have time to find out.)<p>8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.<p>9. America Has Venture Funding.<p>10. America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers. (Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers. For example, in America people often don't decide to go to medical school till they've finished college. In Europe they generally decide in high school.)<p>11. Attitude (There's one item conspicuously missing from this list: American attitudes. Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. But America has no monopoly on this. Indians and Chinese seem plenty entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't believe it. I think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack examples.)
If the issue is about security and not economics,
free open source platforms already exist.<p>Europe should fund them heavily and by doing so give them the advertising power to compete with for-profit ones.<p>Otherwise they will end up squandering a lot of money, Covid apps are not a good example.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/henwet/the_uk_gov_just_spent_118_million_on_a_covid/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/henwet/the_uk_...</a>
> The remaining non-trivial challenge is how to turn such EU funding into quality software<p>This is not a trivial challenge though. It's basically about creating a business climate that would allow startups grow fast and capture dominating positions on both European and worldwide markets.<p>Funding, with all its importance (look at what DARPA funding has enabled) can only give a first impulse, help a team create a prototype of something innovative. The rest is on legislation, investing culture, taxation etc.
Needs a corresponding article called «the US anti-trust problem», of course american companies are bigger when they can just buy up the competition while continuing to run the actual service into the ground (facebook, twitter and youtube/google all fits here) since there’s no alternative…<p>Or maybe it should just be called «the US Social Media problem»…<p>(There’s also the tax issue, but that’s mostly on countries like Ireland and The Netherlands being tax havens (UK too, but they left, kinda…))
We already have plenty of OSS software.<p>Signal can be a perfect replacement for Whatsapp. If the EU want to spend money on maintaining, improving and deploying Signal, that'd be great.<p>People still won't use it, though.<p>It's too late. If Europe wants a slice of the market they need to make business as frictionless as possible like the USA did in the past - that will bring capital, eventually.<p>I think Europe has bigger problems to care about though.
As much as I partly agree with this article, I find it painful to read because it shoddily reengineers bits of Free (as in freedom) software discourse. Specifically that proprietary software subjugates users with malicious features to make money - the US is more creative at doing this than European ones. But yes I agree, the US is better at it, for better or for worse.
I think the European equivalents of faangs were killed in the dotcom bubble. These business models were probably considered "toxic" by investors in the 2000s because of dotcom trauma, which might have been worse in Europe?<p>We are left with US survivors in these particular cases.
Czech here. In my opinion, Europe lacks the venture capitalist culture that formed the Silicon Valley.<p>Actually, most of the U.S. lack it as well, but having one Silicon Valley is much better than having zero of them.<p>European startups struggle to raise any money at all. (And I mean on the order of 100,000 eur, much less millions.) Our banks are extremely risk-averse and if they spend money at all, it is on projects that the <i>political</i> sphere supports. These tend to be duds.
At first, a bus driver should not have bigger salary than software developer, period. But in EU, a truck driver or bus driver having better status and credit karma that scientist or just a programmer.
Perhaps EU should own software companies developing open-source software that each country can adapt to its needs. It is common with state-owned energy and water utilities. Why not software?
Want to establish a business in Europe? Good luck wasting 150 hours a month only for compliance with billions of laws and spending the rest 10 hours for the actual development.
"Since all communication platforms are now free, the only way to get people to use competitive European software and services is to also offer these for free, and to make sure this technology is very good and compelling"<p>I have never seen a government or any regulation deliver anything "good and compelling", or take any other action to "make sure" someone else delivers it.
Innovation requires instability. Europe decided long ago that life security and 'quality of life' was their goal, which is a worthy goal, but every decision you make means there is a path you didn't take.<p>You can't have everything.
Everything is broken in the US, so of course there is a culture of innovation - who knows, maybe you'll actually make things better!<p>Everything works perfectly already in Europe, so why let anyone rock the boat?
> European investors specifically are much more interested in traditional business plans than US venture capitalists. “Data is the new oil” does not translate well into German, French or Spanish.<p>> In addition, with the GDPR, NIS (2) Directive & other regulations, data in Europe is definitely more “the new toxic waste”. It is in any case not a business plan.<p>> So not only do we lack the imagination to launch free platforms, the path to one day making money with them is blocked by regulation.<p>So protecting your citizens' rights and their privacy is "lack of imagination"? This is such a horrible argument. As if the only way to provide a service were to spy on your users.
Yea. Europe seems to be taking a strong stance on things from a human pov but I can’t help but feel that’s a sure way to lose in the world that is coming.<p>The only thing better than data is big data. Yet gdpr etc is basically the opposite<p>Worse yet the same applies to the US. Think US will lose against the Chinese model too. Not as badly as Europe given the sketchy shit US big players are allowed to do but that’s still a far cry from the collect everything model the US is up against