Zuck claims "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws,institutionalizing censorship and making difficult to build something innovative"
Ouch. As a European, I feel very wary of such a sentence and the implications.
Time for Europe to wake up ?
(edit: fix typos)
I'm not sure that we are awake. As a dev for a long time, I realized only 6 months ago, that all the tools I use daily are directly from US.
My job and my life would be very very different without this technology.
We are loosing ground, or more, we are falling down more and more quickly.
It is individual of course. But for example Emanuel Macron and Mario Draghi have sounded the bell quite clearly. As individual citizens we should try to buy European any time there is a European alternative.
It's pretty much right. Dig into what it takes to run a social network in most European countries and you'll hit at minimum the following problems:
• Lack of a DMCA equivalent. DMCA lays out a lightweight process for platforms to process copyright disputes which if they follow it will avoid legal liability, which is needed on any platform that hosts user generated content. The EU Copyright acts require platforms themselves to enforce copyright and prevent users violating it. This is a gigantic technical implementation problem all by itself. Also, the US has the legal concept of fair use but that's not a concept in much of Europe, so people posting parodies etc thinking it's OK can still create liability problems.
• No equivalent of Section 230. Many new laws that specifically criminalize the hosting of illegal speech, and which don't give any credit for effort. As what's illegal is vague and political in nature you can't make automated systems or even human-driven systems that reliably handle it, so the legal risks are large even with a good faith effort to comply.
• GDPR, "right to be forgotten" and NetzDG style laws have large fixed costs associated with compliance which established companies can absorb but startups can't. For instance it's common for EU lawmakers to demand 24 hour turnaround times, which you can't reliably comply with if you're a one man startup.
• Algorithmic transparency laws, which mean you can't obtain any competitive advantage by better ranking (being good at this is how TikTok got so big), and which can threaten your ability to clear spam or use ML.
• Laws around targeted advertising mean you can't generate revenue comparable to what the US based firms can do, so you can't be competitive and your users will be annoyed by low quality barrel scraping ads for casinos after they click "No" on a consent screen without reading it.
There's probably more. For example, running a commercial search engine or training AI models on the internet is illegal in the UK, because UK copyright law only allows "data mining" for research purposes. There's no way to argue it's fair use like they do in the US. Just one of many such problems off the top of my head.
Looking around my apartment and my life, I see a Japanese game console, Japanese camera, US speakers, US laptop, Czech/German car, French photo software, Czech IDE, Swedish furniture, Swiss/US computer accessories, Chinese IoT devices, and a lot of the stuff was manufactured in China. If anything, my life would be very different without China (whether I like it or not).
I don't know how to say this inoffensively, but a lot of US people seem to mistake the slightly higher chance (from 1/inf to 2/inf) of becoming a billionaire with a higher quality of life, and the ability of the select few to hoard capital for a rich society.
I know of exactly 0 European businesses they use free open source software for their office suites.
Z-E-R-O.
I don’t even think companies have their own mailservers anymore, its mostly gsuite and microsoft office 365; people aren’t even hosting business critical applications in Europe unless compliance forces them- let alone using European made tools to do it.
There's a lot more to life than a lot of things, I'm not really trying to discuss personal fulfilment, moreso mentioning that there's no reality where we can get by with European technology right now, and if the US decided to sanction a european country that country would suffer a pretty significant (trillion-euro most likely) shock to productivity, as not only would they need to find new tools and retrain, but they would also lose all their mail and documents.
Yes I somewhat agree on FOSS and I agree for the people.
But I think that for the capital, it is massively US controlled (though is international too).
Think of the seven first companies of the S&P500. (GAFAM, Nvidia, ...)
If you look at the cac40 (france) or EUROSTOXX50 : I dont use directly any products of the tech company. But I'm sure that these companies use at least one the seven.
Tech company in Europe are not ridiculous, but they are not leading the change. They optimize, they improve, but the lead is us centric.
We have ASML, but for how long. ?
The problem is that these platforms have to be built, and people have to willingly use them... which is hard, given Meta have built brilliant addiction machines.
The whole threat here is you can't regulate Meta away, because they'll use the US Government to bully you into not doing so. I'd imagine if the EU tried to publicly prop up a platform not making any profit, they'd do the same.
But yes, the only way is for this to happen. But either way, this was the scariest statement of the announcement(s).
As a European who does generaly feel that the continent is on its way to becomming a museum, describing the absolute bilge that the flagship products of Facebook, YouTube, X etc are as 'innovative' feels in the same ballpark as describing the work of tobacco companies to sell and advertise their products in the 50s-80s as innovative.
They were innovative.
I don’t know for other eu countries, but it seems that in France, there were only unsuccessful copycat of end user service. I’m probably a bit harsh, it’s because I m under impression that the gap between us (eu vs us) is widening. 10 years ago, there was open source, there was ovh, there was hope. With the cloud, we have surrender a lot of power to massive us company.
As a European I would say that Europe's governments are radically more focused on the well-being of their populations than say, the USA.
But... is it just luck or is it this Nanny-state issue that makes it very hard to think of a single major Internet destination or tech company that was born in Europe?
The through-line is US/China with the vast majority. Eu I can only think of Spotify for non-retail.
Being in Europe I find no shortage of local versions of companies for all kinds of providers but only the large social media or platforms are outside of EU mostly in US as a rule.
The issue seems to be that saturation is real and the moat gets larger with time when companies just gobble up all their competition. How could Here maps compete with the free google maps + apples large pockets, etc. TomTom used to be much larger and European, seems to still survive but nowhere near to the size it could've otherwise.
The faster we decouple from societies like american, the better we europeans will be. We europeans defend our European way of life, against the degenerate capitalism of the US.
As an American who lived in Europe in the 90s when I was young, a lot that I really appreciated about the European way of life has deteriorated and is now almost unrecognizable to me in some ways.
When I visit every few years, it amazes me how quickly Europe is “Americanizing”. More fast food and less traditional food. Ripping up vineyards that have been there for centuries. Fewer protections for your farmers. More people walking around staring at their phones and less people talking to each other in cafes. Seems like almost everyone dresses like Americans and can speak English now. And it’s hard to tell the difference between the coffee shops in Spain and those in San Francisco. How long until you start building suburbs and driving everywhere?
Don’t get me wrong—I love the U.S., and I love living here. But its culture is not for Europe.
Comments like this are interesting because the changes you’re describing aren’t really “Americanizing”, they’re just a sign of modern times.
For example: People weren’t walking around staring at their cellphones in Europe in the 90s because they were distinctly European. It was because we didn’t have smartphones anywhere. The smartphone changes happened in lockstep across the globe.
Likewise, many of your other points are purely people’s personal preferences. I think your criticisms are largely nostalgia for the 90s and your time spent living abroad, not an indictment of “Americanizing” Europe.
Vineyards are ripped up because they have become unprofitable due to decreased alcohol consumption in general. I'm not sure that has much to do with Americanization.
I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing. This is also aside from the fact that Europe is also a subscriber to capitalism.
America is the most successful country on this earth and we bankroll most of the rest of the world but somehow we’re always the bad guys.
As an American I’d be very happy if my tax dollars stopped getting spent on Europe.
Somehow US Americans managed in about a year and some to almost singlehandedly fund complete destruction of already impoverished and entrapped society of 2.3 million people, most of them younger than 18. Nevermind the pressure or direct military attacks on other nations to not intervene.
And you wonder why you're viewed as baddies.
I'd be happy if your tax dollars stopped going outside of US, too.
> America is the most successful country on this earth
According to what metrics? life expectancy? crime rate? wealth per inhabitant? education? work life balance? health care? happiness? incarceration rate? human rights? corruption? freedom of press?
American tax dollars aren't spent in Europe or elsewhere in the world for some altruistic reason. The US want to maintain their hegemony and prevent other powers from emerging. They certainly don't care about Europeans or Taiwanese or whoever.
> I challenge you to find another economic system that has worked in history, because it sure isn’t communism if that’s what you’re referencing.
Not that I'm a big fan of communism or China, but communist China has been doing pretty well, and is getting more innovative than the US
The part of China that is innovative is not communist. They have the most free-market labor market, the most free-market regulations in everything except media (which is heavily controlled by the state).
China is the most brutally capitalist society in the world, with a dictator sitting on top managing it at the margins and ensuring media will never be free and threaten the communist party.
There is also the good old: "We can't discuss changes because there is nothing better already existing. There can't be anything better because we cannot change"
