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Comment by squiggleblaz | Hacker News Reader

I guess it depends on your definition of a "world player". By GDP, it goes something like US, EU, China, Japan, India, UK, Brazil, Canada, Russia, South Korea, Australia. There's a fairly large gap (more than double) between Japan and China.

Obviously exact orders will depend on the estimate and how fair it is to use 2019 figures and then subtract the UK from them.

But however you slice it, the UK is not pocket change. Maybe smaller companies can ignore all but the largest three, but I doubt it.

It's more likely that the UK will prefer a more liberal market, and for that reason their laws will be a little ignored - they won't enforce them and will forever be planning their repeal even if they never quite get there.

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GDP rankings are as follows from the last posted results (2018):

  1) United States 20,544,343.46
  2) China 13,608,151.86
  3) Japan 4,971,323.08
  4) Germany 3,947,620.16
  5) United Kingdom 2,855,296.73
  6) France 2,777,535.24
  7) India 2,718,732.23
  8) Italy 2,083,864.26
  9) Brazil 1,868,626.09
  10) Canada 1,713,341.70

So out of "EU" it's only Germany which was larger according to those figures (from the World Bank).

Of course things will have changed over the last couple of years, but I doubt it is substantially different in terms of order.

UK's been ping-ponging between 5th and 7th due to the pound fluctuations.

In reality the EU is not a unified market for e-commerce because of the language barriers and very large discrepancies in laws. For example, France has some pretty crazy stuff to protect the French language, Germany is very strict about certain subjects and the denial of them like the holocaust. And while there are some top level EU laws or efforts to police the bigger internet players, enforcement is still mainly regional too.

I'm under no pretensions that the UK is far, far from the super-power status of the US or now China, or previously USSR.

But if we're a blip, most countries in the world aren't even a notch.

> But if we're a blip, most countries in the world aren't even a notch.

That is the impression I’ve been getting from what economists have been saying. Of course, not being in economist myself, there is no way for me to tell if I’m reading real economists or merely people wearing economist clothing.

> I guess it depends on your definition of a "world player”

Fair. I mean in the sense of being influential enough to set the rules, standards, and norms.

> Maybe smaller companies can ignore all but the largest three, but I doubt it.

I guess the logical question is: How many companies ignore the Japanese or Indian markets?

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