EU-wide regulation might make sense to give a "stick" to existing giants, but what about creating an EU-wide "carrot" for European companies to become giants (in the form of unified market and capital)?
Ms. Vestager kind of glosses over this (2:40 min into the interview video).
Everyone's (EU, India etc.) super impressed by how China was able to homegrow a couple of tech giants and wants in on the action. This is more about having EU be competitive in the tech space than it is about really protecting the interests of ordinary Europeans.
They're well within their rights to do it of course, that's how trade works, but I expect the US to defend American companies from unfair sanctions like this one.
Competition doesn't even arise in the US now, it's monopolies and rent extractors all the way. If some of them are forced to break up or be outright outlawed, that should be enough of a carrot for local competitors.
OK, bear with me here. So, a US company can create a huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't?
Seems that language and regulations are not the barriers here.
Even US companies aren't that "unified", they're hailing from a specific state (often California) and have nothing to do with the other 49. You could easily swap "California" with "Germany".
Looks to me like access to capital and risk aversion are the biggest problems. Always have been.
The UK is by far the best place for a startup in Europe, and I'd wager that will stay the same even after Brexit, as long as every other country has this obsession with saving cash and not investing in risky business, or any business at all.
Localization is easy, getting millions for a startup is hard. And God forbid you fail, you will very likely never get any funding from anyone in the EU and will have to move to the US. Such a waste of entrepreneurs.
> huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't?
Yes, because that US company was already big in the first place thanks to its foothold in the US (a single-language market). The same thing was starting to happen with AliExpress just before the pandemic but I'm not so sure how things stand right now (politics-wise, mostly).
It's pretty hard close to impossible to become a "google" or "facebook" in the local German or French markets big enough to conquer the rest of the continent. Spotify and the rest of the similar European products have had the success that they encountered precisely because they focused on an international (i.e. English-speaking) market first.
I believe it's possible with a way bigger marketing/sales team, from all around Europe, so the product could be marketed all over Europe (and the world).
Basically, I think starting with just one language is a mistake - if you're aiming for the whole EU market, start with as many languages as you can.
Of course, that will be more expensive on a continent where funding is not easily available.
Some resellers, Wish and Joom for example, have ads in every European language, it's the same ad but with different text/voiceover. Seems to work pretty well for them.
Seems to have worked out well enough for Blocket.se/LeBonCoin.fr and Covoiturage.fr/BlaBlaCar.com...
Not to mention Nokia... until bought by Microsoft!
"OK, bear with me here. So, a US company can create a huge market for itself in the EU, but a EU company can't?"
US companies can create massive businesses within the US. They are backed by massive VCs, national press.
Once you're 'big in the US' you can knock out many other countries like dominos - except for those that are protected, or too big, or both.
EU nations are mostly separate. The Swedish market is basically too small to be relevant for most things, to have a credible business model you have to raise money on the basis of 'EU wide' and that's a hard thing to do.
French media doesn't care one bit about Swedish startups, just the opposite, they probably prefer their own.
Ebay and Amazon bought up all their smaller competition in Europe, that same pattern is repeated.
The language barrier is a relatively minor issue, in the great scheme of things. The real barriers are on practical matters on taxation and investment, like the VAT situation. While every country is allowed to have fundamentally different tax policies and regulation, there is no real level-playing field. The rules are still too loose.
We need a degree of fiscal integration at the federal level, similar to what the US have. At that point, smart people running smart companies will be free enough to deal with the cultural-border problems just fine.
Companies that have multi-lingualism built in and are a bit savy about EU-specific contexts do just fine. In fact if they do well in one country they tend to do well everywhere in the continental EU. We're all remarkably similar, despite the linguistic barriers and the remaining chauvinistic prejudices. I'm thinking about Zalando, Vinted, Idealo, ManoMano etc.
Local laws and regulation is a bigger issue I think.
Yes EU unifies a lot of things, but also leaves a lot of details up to the individual nations which means things aren't quite as similar as one might imagine.
The market is getting much more unified every year - the difference between now and 2000 is immense. But it's just going to take much more time still. In many areas widely discussed EU-wide regulations don't add regulatory barriers, they harmonize existing national law, thus removing barriers between EU states (though potentially increasing barriers between EU and USA) - but this harmonization requires compromises and thus time.
Question is: why restrict the # of providers shown at all?
They could show a semi-random segmented ranking:
- split all companies into X buckets by ranking
- pick the top from each bucket from 1 to X, then the second best from each bucket etc.
Humans are cognitively extremely bad at comprehending (visualising) the big effects that can accrue from small things (hence the magic of compound interest). We expect big effects to come from big things.
They also use this technique in Japan in stores - confirming the amount of money received, pointing to the money, to the cash register etc. I think it serves the same purpose, though it probably feels less awkward as it's directed towards another person (though people don't usually respond to the assistant talking).
I think it's because pointing into space gives your actions physical coordinates that organize them similarly as in memory. In fact, a popular mnemonic technique is to envision the stuff you need to remember "positioned" along a street route or another physical space you know very well (it's called the Method of Loci).
I'm for buying slightly more expensive butter if that would incentivize breeding cows for milk rather than meat. Butter still being more of a small treat than main source of fats.
And living on a dairy farm, growing up in the dairy industry... I can tell you that I have yet to see a "dairy is cruel" article that gets the facts right. I suppose it's more "cruel" then just turning a cow loose on a huge pasture and letting it live it's life, except for predators, illness, drought, poor diet causing intestinal distress, etc that doesn't happen on a dairy farm.
Yes, the problem started when humans decided to domesticate animals during the agricultural revolution. Since then all farm animals exist because we bring them into existence for our convenience.
All sentient beings should have at least one right: the right not to be treated as property.
If we took animals seriously, we would stop treating them as our resources, as our property. But that would mean an end to bringing nonhumans into existence so that we can use them for food, clothing, vivisection, or any other purpose.
It's been scientifically proven that we don't need animal products to be healthy, so humans are basically exploiting animals for no better reason than palate pleasure. And to top it off animal agriculture is having a horrific impact on the environment.
We can live without participating in the exploitation of the vulnerable.
We can live without destroying the environment.
We can live in a way that guarantees a more healthy life.
Perhaps off-topic: if you have not read "The mind's eye" by Oliver Sacks, you may find it helpful, emotionally. Keeping an (audio) journal might help also to cope with anxiety.
You can share a specific recording by creating a link valid for 24 hours, intended for p2p sharing.
We've heard people use this for similar things: teachers teaching kids, journaling, voice memos, tracking investment decisions, recipes etc. Limitation is that there's one photo per recording atm.
Ms. Vestager kind of glosses over this (2:40 min into the interview video).