Item — HN Reader

I think there's a few things here:

a) Having English be the national language is a massive advantage which only Ireland shares (and Ireland has plenty of American tech outposts). That's an advantage people don't mention often.

b) The EU keeps adding regulations, which make it a less attractive place to invest. The UK seems to copy each of these regulations though, which maybe makes this a moot point.

But I think ultimately, it's probably down to network effects. The same way Twitter/X stuck around even though basically everything about it changed, cities might do the same.

2 comments

> The UK seems to copy each of these regulations though, which maybe makes this a moot point.

Which new EU regulation since Brexit has UK copied into law?

This year, the UK has both an "online safety law" (EU analog: DSA) and a digital market regulation (EU analog: DMA) coming.

Ah thought you meant Brexit agreement compelled UK to copy new EU laws. UK politicians (both Conservative and Labour) love to look around world to copy any regulation targetting business, especially ones targetting tech and online censorship, not far off actual copying China's great firewall...

No I mean more the fact that Britain seems to have left the EU at least in part because they didn't want to deal with EU regulation superseding what the UK wanted...

...and then proceeded to basically copy every EU regulation. Whatever one's take is on EU regulation, it's just odd to me to do that because you basically lose the upside of the EU while keeping the downside.

Inertia can be overcome - some random situation might do it and then the pull the other way would be unstoppable.

Sure, but usually inertia doesn't get undone by some incrementally different alternative, but by something qualitatively different.

The UK and EU have roughly similar problems, benefits, infrastructure and regulatory environments.

If there was a Singapore-like city state off of the coast of France, I'm sure things would look different.