> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation.
There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.
As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.
Exactly, regulation benefits the consumers by allowing for a competitive playing field on innovation, cost and labour.
Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).
Regulations in Europe also seem to have had the, I'm assuming completely unintentional, side effect of completely cementing the positions of the top of society in place. And this is nothing new, this actually predates modern democracy in Europe. It's been that way for centuries. In Europe the only time to leave, or join, the ultra-rich is during wars.
That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.
The problem with the ultra-rich is not that it's hard to get there, but rather that it is possible. Nobody is personally worth billions, period. The fact that some individuals get there shows a flaw in the system.
The second thing that I wanted to say is that even though there are examples of originally not ultra-rich people becoming ultra-rich in the US (e.g. Zuckerberg and Besos), the likelihood of this happening is almost zero. Why is it that people keep hoping that it may happen to them? We should not build a system for a handful to become ultra-rich, but for most to live as well as possible.
The underlying emotionally driven question is what did they do to deserve it. For all of the faults of Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, I don't think I've ever heard of them being called lazy. Someone else getting ahead when they don't deserve it is universal. We get told life isn't fair and just accept it but I don't think I'm alone in never actually accepting it. So unfairness matters.
Amusingly enough, what the GP stated was true in 1910, but now the US is far more like pre-WW1 Europe in terms of distribution of wealth (c.f. Piketty's capital in the 21st century).
Social mobility index doesn’t really look at how easy it is to become very rich (I.e. get into the 1%). This is also explained in the methodology section of the article you linked.
Regulations are complicated and a double edge sword, they inevitably introduce inefficiency and barriers, so the payoff needs to be greater.
For example, regulations about mandating companies to delete your data - wonderful. A great win for California which is otherwise quite an overregulated states.
On the flip side, in the UK, you may need a license for that television, or a license for that knife. That's the political thing with regulations. If a politician says "regulations sucks" most would tend to agree as far as that TV license, or getting a permit for a particular fence.
Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.
The right wing propagandist who photoshopped "I hate free speech" over Nancy Faeser standing at a Holocaust memorial and holding a sign with the Text: "We remember"? I guess it is kinda important to not ignore the context of the edited image, especially since Germany for good reasons is not including the rights of holocaust deniers and Nazis in their free speech.
Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree.
Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case.
Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it.
Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.
Popper said we should tolerate the intolerant as long as they aren't violent, so its the exact opposite of what you say.
In general intolerance just breeds more intolerance, people are much less tolerant today than 10 years ago due to the massive amount of intolerance towards intolerance that proliferated the past 10 years.
Violence is such a nebulous concept, though. There are forms of violence that aren't physical, even though the law typically only recognise those. Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence? Is calling for harm upon them? Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence? Is it violence if it's through willful inaction?
I think all the above are, although the trade-off line is somewhere above mockery.
Violence = actual illegal physical violence or (legal) credible threat of illegal physical violence by individuals, or legal state-authorized physical violence or seizure of assets (policy).
> Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence?
no
> Is calling for harm upon them?
maybe
> Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence?
maybe
> Is it violence if it's through willful inaction?
no
40 police officers were injured and 27 taken to hospital, so I would certainly classify that as violence. I don't think we should tolerate that level of misinformation designed to stir up racist hatred.
The same way you make sure your planes fly, your code is updated, and you improve your product - you pay attention to your regulators.
The SEC was defanged for years. The pendulum swung to low regulation, and lower taxes, leading to greater wealth concentration via asset purchases.
These are all rectifiable. At all levels. It just not going to happen if we are listening to zero information news sources and disengage with everything but rage.
How is this a mystery? What matters is whether the state provides funding for innovation. The market will never support a first moon landing. The market will not even support something like starlink, where the use is obvious. The US' technological advantage is the result of massive continuous state investment after WW2 and through the cold war. There were periods of such investment in Europe, but they have been over for decades now. The only places where some lasted during the cold war were the UK and France, and both of those are well and truly over. In the US they're only now dropping fast under Trump.
The CCP is providing absurd amounts of funding for commercial innovation. Not just money either. Everything from monetary stimulus, tax exemptions (and strategically forgiving outright tax evasion) even "honey traps" (hiring prostitutes to entrap foreigners, even long term), even kidnapping foreigners.
There were quite a few unicorns that (until now) quickly moved to establish a US foothold and hired some of their new C-levels there, because that's where the lobbying and money typically are.
Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).
I've just realized that this describes almost half of my career: ten years at a UK startup that almost immediately set itself up with a Delaware corp and a San Francisco office, so it could eventually sell out to Cadence; then several more years at a UK university chip design spinoff that also got bought out by a US multinational.
Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.
I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies.
So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich.
It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?
> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug
Cope much?
As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.
To be fair, this doesn't really require these sorts of trillion euro unicorns to achieve, although it really is sad to see our industries be reliant on a regime that may turn hostile at the drop of a hat.
We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.
As a Microsoft employee who spent 25 years in telco before joining and was very much into the enterprise hosting scene, let me tell you that nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services.
Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship.
Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those).
It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver.
And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.
> could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could
Amazon's biggest superpower is their ability to convince customers that they need the scale, international coverage and breadth of features regardless of the reality of their needs. Being on $BigCloud is a signal many small companies are sending to show they keep in step with the times. The real needs could often be addressed in simpler, cheaper ways.
Your car doesn't do everything a road vehicle can do. Your software doesn't do everything a software could do. Why would your cloud provider need to offer everything a cloud can offer? It's that "nobody got fired for choosing AWS" even if any future move is a prohibitively expensive redesign of everything.
I think that some of this is an inherently Telco problem. The same reason as the US internet isn't dominated by AT&T, and the X25 etc series of protocols lost to the internet ones.
Part of it, perhaps. But telcos have shifted from getting revenue from business services to mass-market stuff like broadband and being a conduit for streaming services, as well as outsourcing most of their critical systems -- which was another reason why many people left the industry.
Telcos aren't going to be able to pivot this without paying for knowledgeable staff.
> nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services
I agree. But that's the long-term problem to fix. Getting into bar fights or rambling about how we are So Much More Moral and So Much Better than everyone else isn't going to make the EU more competitive.
Yep. But all the informal chats I've had over the years across Europe (from Greece to the Nordics) point to no change whatsoever because even though we have more and more sovereignty concerns there is zero interest from national governments in truly invest in anything but showy stuff that will bring immediate cashbacks -- like 5G licensing, which also taxed telcos and infrastructure providers heavily without any real return (and thus soaked up any mindshare/cash they might have to improve the hosting situation).
Hertzer in Europe is pretty good, but they don't have first mover advantage and they haven't got as much control of mindshare in governments. A lot of people only discovered their existence once the US went to the dark side.
Technically many of these server/hosting companies were in the market first. Hetzner is older than AWS. Mailbox is like 10 years older than gmail/google.
So the US companies are the ones who didnt have first mover advantage.
I meant at hyperscaling. AWS was already doing it with their own servers, so they had both the producer and consumer working in one place to expand out.
I don't get this interpretation of "free". Would you say that one should be "free" to kill someone else?
Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you).
So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this.
If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument.
Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.
> Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument.
Because your sarcasm was constructive, maybe?
> my implicit argument is that
Next time, maybe consider making it explicit and without using sarcasm.
My explicit answer was that if you consider that regulations are fundamentally against freedom, then I disagree. To me, it's perfectly fine to regulate unicorns if we believe it is better for the society. You can disagree with the fact that it would be better for society, but that's not what you said. What you said is that regulating against unicorns would be against freedom.
I must point out that you introduced the word "ban." I did not. I don't even know what "banning Unicorns" means, or how that would work.
I said, "Unicorns are a problem and should not exist." I suspect that regulation that protects competition and the free market is a pretty effective way of preventing Unicorns from arising in the first place.
In my mind, regulations preventing unicorns (I.e statups > 1B in valuation) would require restricting personal decisions on where to invest money based on size. Protecting competition or free markets IMO would not succeed in preventing unicorns but maybe there is a plan that could work.
My understanding is that unicorns are typically so highly valued because investors believe they will be able to corner their market and achieve monopolistic control over it. This is often their long-term strategy: undercut the market, drive out or buy out competition, and eventually increase prices and enshittify service while continuing to buy or legally destroy any potential competition.
There are a lot of links in that chain that strong pro-competition regulation could break.
What would a ban even look like in the US? who would enforce it? if it profits the republican party, then there's no government agency left to enforce laws against that.
People need a trillion-dollar company for even simpler tasks like exchanging messages with their friends and families.
Why? Because the UX and reliability of that option is superior to anything else. Which of course means Billions of users flock to that service. Which brings insane revenue and economies of scale. Which can be invested into improving the UX and reliability further than the competitors. Now the company has a big moat around its business and a Trillion dollar valuation.
Pure bullshit rationalization. UXs of big tech are often full of dark-patterns, they're constantly copying from or acquiring smaller players, and they're only growing because of network effects.
Pray tell me what are the dark patterns in WhatsApp. My entire circle uses it purely because it is the best app out there. Signal, iMessage or Google's dozen or so chat apps do not come anywhere close.
Pray tell why you need to cherry-pick examples in your arguments.
Just because you consider ONE product from a large company good, doesn't make every single big tech product the same. Meta is from a completely different sector from the one I was talking about, and its other two money-making main products are riddled with tracking and dark-patterns.
My point stands: nobody needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website.
Yes, I agree: unicorns are, by and large, a failure of capitalism, not an example of success. They result from a system that doesn't value competition but values winning.
That's not to say that the European tech sector is doing fantastically. Still, as an end user, I'd rather have a thousand companies like Proton, Filen, Tutanota, Tresorit, Infomaniak, or DeepL than one Google.
I doubt Proton is written by exactly one person (I actually know more than one person who worked there ;-) ), and I'm pretty certain they were working in Switzerland.
There's no risk capital. There's no vision. No guts, no glory. Just old glory.
A bunch of scared real-estate investors and pension funds who have their roots in STAYING in Europe when the (ad)venturers went overseas and built what has become the US.
Hehe, that's certainly one way of looking at it. Just as well we could say that the religious fanatics, the absolutists, the utopians, and some other malcontents dissatisfied with the enlightenment went overseas to establish their puritan and perfect societies because those boring Europeans just wouldn't see the light and all the violence did not change that.
Would that be more accurate? No, but no less either.
There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.
As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.