Item — HN Reader

I have always promised myself that if I become a billionare, I will simply stop providing services to municipalities or countries that create arbitrary laws that make it hard or difficult to do business in. Honestly Google should have just boycotted Europe for a week and seen how well everyone handles not having gmail, google, or anything.

California is particularly onerous about all sorts of stuff like labelling everything as cancerous even though you'll probably need to spend 60 years licking the plastic bag labelled as such, or GDPR which required thousands and thousands of man hours at my last job when we weren't in Europe, the law was legally unclear, etc. Or the stupid cookie banners which guess what - do nothing.

edit: another example was at working at a cigar shop where we could happily sell individual cigars and ship them, we could sell boxes of cigars, but we couldn't sell pre-packaged mix and match bags since, well you know, they weren't individually recognized and regulated skus (even though their contents were) and we just decided to drop that program. It's a shame, mix and matching cigars is great. PROP 65 Warning: smoking kills you.

15 comments

> Honestly Google should have just boycotted Europe for a week and seen how well everyone handles not having gmail, google, or anything.

I think the EU would have loved that. There are perfectly viable alternatives to pretty much everything that Google offers, some of which created in Europe. They just never gain any traction because it's convenient to just use Google for everything.

I still use Gmail and Google Calendar at the moment, but that's primarily out of inertia. The biggest thing I'd miss would probably be search, but even for that there are reasonable alternatives.

Out of curiosity, what are the European alternatives to GSuite?

The biggest competitors are obviously not European (eg. MS, Fastmail) but there are smaller companies like mailbox.org that offer less polished but functional alternatives. I'm not saying that those would be a perfect replacement for everything that Google offers, but they get close enough that they might do the trick for a large number of people (which would then give them the income to make further improvements to their platform).

LibreOffice, to some extent. But more pertinently, the Czech search engine Seznam[1], founded in 1996, was the most used search engine in the Czech Republic until Google took over in 2014 due to the influence of Android. Seznam is well diversified and it shouldn't be difficult for it to expand into other markets given the opportunity. It is a major regional player in search, maps, email, news, real estate, jobs, ecommerce, video streaming, advertising, and probably more. Its portfolio, which includes a chromium-based web browser, is quite impressive given that the Czech market consists of some 11 million people.

[1]: https://seznam.cz

ONLYOFFICE and NextCloud can do a whole bunch of cloud things, both for personal and business use, although I guess you could mention several things that are great in GSuite and not offered at all by these two.

Spinning up a Nextcloud instance for $5 a month will replace almost everything that Google did in your life, as well as giving you a lot more granular control over your data.

There's nothing, not even close and it's obviously a problem.

The reason a lot of this antagonism exists is because the EU is not able to compete in a lot of these areas.

While there's a lot of good impetus is privacy legislation, there should be 10x more effort into gearing themselves to be more competitive.

Edit: Europe's inability to materially face this problem is by far the #1 issue. There definitely is an acceptance, on some level, behind closed doors certainly there is discussion and some action, but much more energy seems to be devoted to punishing foreign, successful companies.

It's a bad position to be in to try to legislate foreign behemoths than to have your own, and be worried about how foreign nations may be regulating your own behemoths.

Edit 2: I've made a similar comment a few times and it's guaranteed to be down-voted (again, that's fine, I don't mind it's not a personal issue I have no problem with votes) - but assuming that this is more than likely Europeans down-voting as a rough measure of disagreement, it's really quite a disturbing sentiment that at least popularly, there's difficulty in accepting the obvious lack of competitiveness in these areas. This is why I say it's the #1 challenge - until there is acceptance, there will no progress.

> I think the EU would have loved that.

"The EU" entirely depended on Google not doing that. And by that I mean the bureaucracy and other apparatjik - not the people.

Had Google literally banned Europe the backlash would be large, large, large against 'the EU' from people who live there and were trying to live and do their day to day online activities.

Yeah, it'd be Evil, but sometimes companies should really swing back at heavy handed regulations.

I wouldn't be so sure. Google is an American company, and there could well be an element of nationalism in the response, i.e., a sentiment that "stupid imperialist Americans are trying to force us to change our national laws." Furthermore, a monopoly operator that objects to new regulation isn't the kind of entity that typically elicits a lot of sympathy.

I highly doubt any young person would think that way. Maybe older than 40 would.

I'm not sure if Google would have much support after blocking users and refusing to follow laws that exist to protect users.

It seems you don’t see the value in having one integrated provider for everything. Other people clearly do.

Also if there were GOOD European alternatives to those google service people would use them, but there simply aren’t. Low salaries and terrible regulations are to blame.

I'm not sure many people go upload on youtube because they already had a gmail, and a small enterprise loosing all their documents because they got their home made ads copystriked by drive by DMCA trolls also doesn't sound like a great integration feature...

Honestly, what, beyond the account infrastructure, is integrated in googles consumer products?

Do you understand the difference between US vs EU markets? As in: demographics issues, language issues, product targeting issues?

There are no good European alternatives due to a conflation of these issues, not just because of regulations, that's such a naive (or willingly ignorant) take on a complex issue.

How would European tech companies start and compete against FAANG right now? Given that the EU market is quite fragmented between demographics and language? How can an European tech company avoid being acqui-hired or acqui-killed by one of the current massive tech giants?

If you don't develop your arguments of what kind of regulation holds EU tech companies back and posit that against the issues I mentioned then I can't really trust you understand the problem and differences between markets that give benefits to the US economy, as it always had, it's a massive and more homogeneous economy than the EU.

Let's compare US vs China tech as that seems more of an appropriate comparison from the baseline.

I don't think regulations are holding people back.

Low salaries, yes, but that's a failure of leadership, but also a systematic problem of companies inability to make tons of money.

It's a long laundry list and it can't be boiled down just to a few things, they are so intertwined it's hard to separate the issues.

> Honestly Google should have just boycotted Europe for a week and seen how well everyone handles not having gmail, google, or anything.

So we'd all be using outlook.com, bing and other alternatives now. Would've been a really bad move to just forfeit a market like that.

The cookie banners do actually help a lot, as they bring awareness about privacy issues to the broader public and allow to choose which sites to use based on how hard they make it to opt-out.

Laws like this are important because they make companies design for the benefit of the consumer as opposed to just for their own. And I'm gald the EU is pushing for this with the power they have while no other legal entity of similar size seems to bother.

I'd love for Google to give the EU a solid reason to encourage homegrown (and tax-paying) alternatives to big US tech (much like China has managed to do with Baidu, WeChat and Alibaba). Breaking big tech monopolies is hard, so I can only pray for them to get the ball rolling with a massive mistake like that.

> I'd love for Google to give the EU a solid reason to encourage homegrown (and tax-paying) alternatives to big US tech

Big tech pays it's taxes in Europe, via Luxemburg and Ireland in a 100% legal way. If Europeans countries are serious about collecting tax revenues they claim should be theirs, all they have to do is simply write it in the tax code.

If Europe wants to compete, the first thing it has to do is fix it's talent retention problem. Build more and pay more.

Easy to whine about these "evil foreign tech giants", harder to tackle the real issues! Will paying coders more get bureaucrats re-elected? Will going after large corporations using the same laws as the tech giants help them getting re-elected?

The moment your argument for paying 0.01% taxes is "it's legal", you've fallen pretty low for the quality of your arguments.

But he is right. Why not just fix this at a policy level?

While paying low tax seems morally wrong, the job of a company is to do good for itself, because they all are responsible to their shareholders.

Google left China on moral grounds in 2000s. Did that make other companies follow suit? No. Apple had no problem censoring or using workers in exploitative conditions to eke out more profits. Did Apple's products get boycotted because of it? No. So, even the users don't care.

So why would a company try to uphold some weird moral standard at the cost of profit when its users and shareholders both don't care?

> Why not just fix this at a policy level?

Because the "Big evil foreign tech giants" aren't the only ones to use these clauses in the tax code. But it's fashionable to bash on them. So you keep the votes and your corporate friends.

Yeah, I really doubt European companies themselves are not using these rules to get out of paying more.

Viewing a company as responsible only to it's shareholders is perspective only proposed and adopted in the last 50/60 years (maybe less), and I believe, a flawed one.

Historically, businesses were understood to also have responsibility to their communities and customers. Also their workers, though perhaps that began to shed somewhat less recently.

In my view, any person or entity is morally responsible for their impacts on others.

So, I believe companies should, indeed, have moral standards.

...

That said yes this is a cultural shift so by no means any kind of immediate solution, and there will always be bad actors, so yes totally agree, fix the policy!

But let's not support a business culture where being a bad actor is cool- it makes the already very difficult job of appropriate regulation that much harder.

> But let's not support a business culture where being a bad actor is cool-

Agreed but what can few individuals even do when masses don't even care? We can try to use our privacy sensitive platforms and modular phones with open OSs but that will not really change anything. If my past experience has anything to go by, all it will do is, we will get shafted by overpaying for substandard experience.

I hate to sound defeatist but unless there can be a change in mainstream consciousness about it, it is mostly a lost cause.

Why even have the argument when a simple well written tax code could make the issue not happen in the first place?

They are paying no more than what they are legally required to, just like everyone else.

Would I want to see Google pay more? Yes. Do I expect them to be charitable and suddenly start paying more than the law requires them? No, this is unreasonable. What I expect is for lawmakers to make changes to the tax code, so that those tech giants end up paying more. Until that moment happens, that's fully on those lawmakers, not on Google or anyone else.

First, I hope you become a billionaire!

However, I don't agree with what you're saying. Are the laws perfect? No. But I do think we need something in place to balance things out so that companies are less predatory with our data. All these laws bring awareness to normal people, even if they click "accept all".

Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

Sincerely, EU citizen

So you've decided to limit yourself to not doing business on planet Earth, or becoming a Bond villain. Interesting choice.

A giant submarine lair would be rather cool, I suppose.

Turns out the real 'Bond Villians' in our world prefer to get stuff done through legal and boring channels like market manipulation (MSFT), breaking the law and using their lawyers to do so (uber), to pay off politicians through lobbying (what would not it in this parenthesis).

You better weight your dreams, because I believe that it's definitely possible that EU would just say fuck yourself to Google, started using Bing meanwhile creating viable Search Engine and US' competitive advantage would be gone

> I have always promised myself that if I become a billionare, I will simply stop providing services to municipalities or countries that create arbitrary laws that make it hard or difficult to do business in.

Do you believe that a society should ONLY maximise metrics towards "ease of business"?

I dream about the FAANG leaving the European market. It would be so many nice opportunities to finally develop our technologies locally like China or Russia are doing.

I really wish people like you who _are_ billionaires would stop making threats and just do it already. Taking your ball and going home because you can't play nice doesn't work in grade school, and won't work in adult life; but maybe there would be a lot less background noise from all the rich people shaking their fists and threatening to do things we know damn well they never will.

Because they know the sneaky secret too, that businesses will still function and even be profitable (wow), despite also protecting consumers.

The business would work and billionaires don't become billionaires by turning down business.

Does that makes sense if you want to be a Billionaire? Just leave Europe / money on the table and let some competitor take that space?

Some of these laws are ineffective, wonky, and probably annoying, but they're existential threats to doing business.

Those companies are operating globally, not locally. There's great benefits to this (more customers), but you also need to deal with the local laws of all the countries you want to do business in if you want to make money there.

Side note: Can we just not heavily blur post that (maybe) downvoted heavily? I can't even read the post that I quoted atm.

> the law was legally unclear

That's a feature! Gives more power to the bureaucrats (fully paid by the taxpayer and with large retirements) to enforce legislation as they please!

More fine for these large companies means an ever increasing numbers of bureaucrats to investigates arbitrary violations!

If you can't innovate, time to regulate!

Complaining about regulations on an article protecting children <13 years and giving an example about tobacco ( and trying to dodge them probably) seems a good reason to me for having such regulations...

What comes to mind in your example is that tobacco may not advertise/give discounts. Bundling them with something else should have the same result. Not being able to bundle them has the same end-result.

If you want to sell in a certain market, you need to consider local rules that could differ from your own.

Eg. US meat is not allowed in Europe because of the excessive use of hormones in most of their meat.