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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense that European governments would love to see Facebook (and other US giants) exit. Splitting up big-tech is not a good answer to dominance or monopoly, as it adds more heads to the hydra. The answer is pour funding into EU startups, future alternatives that will usurp US giants. But that cannot happen while Google etc are present, as it will be seen as wasted investment. Catch-22. Solution: goad Zuckerberg et al into narcissistic grandstanding, and hope they get cornered by their own words enough to follow though. Google and Facebook already did this dance with Australia, and came off the worse. As a European I would personally be delighted to see the demise of Facebook, Microsoft and other US behemoths over here, as it would surely be a boost to our tech economy.

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I'd rather not see European governments pour tax payer money down the drain.

Perhaps use the funds to lower taxes and improve the regulatory environment to at least stop hindering the growth of the economy instead?

Pouring government money is rarely a good way to make a commercially successful company. Research or creating industries requiring large upfront investments (e.g. silicon) could benefit from it, but EU has not been terribly efficient with it either (Ahem, Galileo, ahem)

My pet conspiracy theory with Galileo is that it was only ever a play towards the Americans to remove the possiblity of a GPS lockdown, which could have been used as a bargaining chip. (Or towards the Russians and Chinese, on the level of "we, the West, can always lock down GPS and Galileo for ourselves if you don't cooperate"). Therefore it was only necessary to put in as much funds as necessary to make it look like a serious project, but not the amount of money to actually get it delivered on a reasonable timescale and level of quality.

> The answer is [for European governments to] pour funding into EU startups

Why's that the answer? It wasn't how the US did it.

@chris, I think DARPA and InQTel show a different way this works. If anything I applaud the US way of doing things - a pattern we totally failed to mirror in Britain after the 1960s Wilson govt, letting greats like ICL and Ferranti die early and not re-investing in smaller firms until the 80s, when we repeated the same mess all over again, totally squandering Acorn and such.

Anyway, however you disguise it it's called "stimulus". I think the will and vision now exists in Europe for 50 year horizons (but not in the UK under our present prize cockwomble Johnson govt who can't see past investing in booze for the next Westminster piss-up).

With all the M&As by big tech it hardly seems worth funding European startups as they’ll just be gobbled up like US startups. That needs to change first.

Although maybe Europeans are slightly less inclined to want to exit at the first financially interesting opportunity? Although investors will probably have a lot to say about that.

@mtsr

I totally agree. Fundamental changes in the nature of the corporation need to occur. How Articles of incorporation function as instruments to enable, but also _exclude_ future M&A is something I'm working on. This is curiously something that "smart contracts" might solve - to create entities that cannot, even in principle, be resold or diluted.

It only dawned on me yesterday that the EU uses data privacy as a pretense for protectionism.

Hardly. The EU has been far more pro privacy than the US for a long time. We haven't used it to block US companies from doing business here. To the contrary, we've bent over backwards with various agreements to allow it to continue. But the last two agreements got shot down in court. Give us reasonable protections and you can compete on a level playing field with every other EU company.

Yes, except its not a 'pretence'. There are different values operating in Europe. Protecting companies that represent those values is a way of protecting the values themselves. We do indeed regard privacy differently than the US I think. European people just aren't down with the "Surveillance Capitalism" (Zuboff) view of the world.

We have our own equally twisted take on "socialist cybernetics", but that's another story.

Not really.

For Example: When GDPR went into effect many companies here in Germany were not really surprised and did not have to change much (if anything).

Why? Because it has always been like this. Some of the specifics changed but in the grand total, things stayed the way they were.

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