How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete? How come OpenAI or Anthropic or Cursor didn't come out of the EU? I'll give you a hint, it's not because of big bad Google.
> How come OpenAI or Anthropic or Cursor didn't come out of the EU?
Access to VCs and funding is easier in the US. Heck, even if you try to build your own startup, with your own funds, when you're out there looking for investments soon enough being "delaware incorporated" will become a requirement.
I don't know the legislation and contract law pertains to funding, and why EU companies need to move to the US to get investor funds (and can't be funded internationally while retaining EU status).
What I can tell you from my experience in seeking out venture/angel/seed funding opportunities in the EU is that many (most) that turn up on search results don't have a "pitch us" form and more of a "we'll find you if we want to fund you". There are also incubators, a la YCombinator, that provide only mentorship and no funding (ie. I would need to quit my job and sustain myself to build a startup).
> How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete?
It's not required to compete. It's just their style and old fashioned. A 1 point hitting kids was the way to go. We all know how that went. The world has changed. Those kingdom eras no longer exist. The EU should bring out real substance.
While I agree with the sentiment, it is not true that only EU takes a “nationalistic” stance and safeguards its interests. US is famously doing it with tariffs..to bring back manufacturing, and I also remember hearing “America first”.
Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.
> only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete [emphasis mine]
Tell me another country that competes with the US on monopolistic tech platforms? The only one I know of is China, and that's because their GFW and regulations essentially prevented US platforms from taking hold to begin with, and their stronghold on tech manufacturing means they actually have teeth when it comes to securing concessions from Western techbros (where as the EU couldn't even be bothered to enforce the GDPR).
Competition by whom? The entire EU software industry is completely pathetic.
The EU has been regulating the US tech for over a decade. In that time the EU has only fallen further behind.
Meanwhile China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US, while the EU is loosing the one large industry which it has left, manufacturing, to China.
This whole thing is pathetic. Of the goal of the EC ever was the creation of a competitive EU software industry it was a total failure and it was bound to be a total failure. Because what they did were idiotic regulations.
Everything the regulations have accomplished is that trying to compete in the EU puts such an enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed.
> China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US
China is in this position because of regulations (and technological enforcement of them like GFW), which prevented US tech from taking any significant foothold and left the market available for local competition.
> enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed
Can you tell me which business can't work in the EU? Selling software is legal. Operating a SaaS is legal. Hell, even industrial-scale spyware is legal, as long as you become big quickly enough so that enforcing the GDPR against you becomes counterproductive. The only thing I see that can't be done is industrial-scale corporation-on-consumer fraud, but I don't think we're losing much because of that.
The regulations were good, it's just that enforcement was and remains dysfunctional and basically non-existent.
Those business-ending GDPR fines HN loves fear-mongering about never materialized. Similarly with the DMA - Apple is still being allowed to stall and wage bureaucratic warfare to not comply.
In contrast, when in China people were found to be using AirDrop's "open to everyone" feature to share content the CCP deemed inappropriate, we quickly got a change where AirDrop would only stay open to everyone for 10 mins before reverting back to "contacts only".
If the EU had the same balls they would give Apple an ultimatum and you'd get alternate browser engines, app stores, and the right to "sideload" overnight.
Yet every time the EU tries to enforce regulations so that technological competition becomes actually possible everyone is mad about it.