[newbie578]

It disturbs me that with each day, it seems like the Great Chinese Firewall was a good solution.

You keep out the foreign competition letting internal competition foster and you stop a capital drain.

Imagine if the EU had it’s own Alibaba, Baidu or WeChat... That is a lot of taxpaying money...

[toast0]

Setting up economic protectionism props up the local industry, which usually results in consumers paying more for lower quality products.

If done well, protectionism can get a local industry started, and be relaxed over time as the local industry starts to become competitive with global industry.

Done poorly, protectionism results in a local market that is a decade behind the state of the art (like Brazil's video game industry was)

[SpicyLemonZest]

This article focuses on Amazon, but the Indian native company Flipkart is facing the same challenges. As the article hints at, these regulations are set up specifically to prevent internal competition; the Indian government wants to protect traditional retail networks against competition from online stores.

[unmole]

> the Indian government wants to protect traditional retail networks against competition from online stores.

Nope, the government wants to protect Jio from global competition.

[kevinkeller]

The regulation will also benefit other smaller players, no? For example, Tata Cliq, Snapdeal.

[neither_color]

I wonder about this. China has its own app ecosystem, as does Russia. India is pushing towards having its own as well. What about Europe? Is it harder because you have to localize to so many languages?

[yorwba]

It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market, it's competition from other companies.

If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch.

The same dynamic also applies within countries, where two interchangeable apps might dominate in different areas or demographics of the same country, without either able to gain significant market share from the other, but it's a bit rarer because of network effects, where people start using an app because they know someone else using it and the app with the most users grows the fastest, eclipsing the competition.

Cross-border network effects in Europe are much weaker than within countries, and not much stronger than between European and non-European countries, so if a company manages to dominate their niche across all of Europe, they'll probably also win in much of the rest of the world.

[dexen]

>It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market

It very much is about localization - both language and to some extent also culture. Both are notable problems with b2c, and there are no "good enough" automated solutions.

My point of reference is the success of Polish domestic "Allegro" ecommerce platform, which was able to out-fox EBay, and later on Amazon, and still maintains dominant position on the local market. There were no significant technological advantages, nor any notable political connections. The platform won purely on being local.

In spite all the local success the platform could not expand to the west of Poland due to localization (language and partly culture). It did expand a little bit to Ukraine and Czech Republic. And while it's possible to browse foreign offers, it's rather rare to do so - due to the language barrier.

[yorwba]

> My point of reference is the success of Polish domestic "Allegro" ecommerce platform, which was able to out-fox EBay, and later on Amazon, and still maintains dominant position on the local market.

Were eBay and Amazon unable to translate their websites into Polish quickly enough for some reason? I just checked https://ebay.pl and http://www.amazon.pl , the latter of which redirects to amazon.de with language set to pl_PL, but nonetheless appears fully translated into Polish.

> There were no significant technological advantages, nor any notable political connections. The platform won purely on being local.

To be clear, I'm not saying that being local doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that localization (in the sense of translating and adapting the website to local preferences) is the least hurdle in becoming local. The much bigger hurdle is acquiring local customers who are already used to local services. Either you have an obviously superior product that local competitors can't match (unlikely for run-of-the-mill online stores) or you're fighting an uphill battle.

> In spite all the local success the platform could not expand to the west of Poland due to localization (language and partly culture). It did expand a little bit to Ukraine and Czech Republic.

My guess is that there are Czechs and Ukrainians in Poland who got familiar with Allegro there and spread it via word of mouth. (I could not find a Czech or Ukrainian version of allegro.pl, so are they using the Polish site?) On the other hand there are likely many more Poles in Germany than Germans in Poland, so Poles would be more familiar with German services than Germans with Polish services. (Case in point: the redirect from amazon.pl to .de)

[908B64B197]

> If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch.

Then acquire it.

[yorwba]

Like Uber acquired Lyft? Most companies don't have the money to acquire all their competitors and neither are their competitors able to acquire them.

[evnix]

no that doesn't seem like the reason, India has more languages than Europe and Europe has mainly two writing systems Cyrillic and Latin while India has a lot more. If India can do it with such low resources, so can Europe.

In my opinion, China and Russia have their own ecosystems because of the language barrier and the physical firewall that their respective governments have put in. India is able to build its own eco system because it has got the fundamentals right, it probably is the only country which broke the Master Card and Visa duopoly allowing local vendors to slash costs by a good margin. I already see a lot of Apps which might pose a threat to the likes of Google in the coming decade(if they are not bought over) but in the long run, I don't see India having a separate ecosystem, India and it's way of thinking is more like the west than it seems to be and it will eventually merge in with larger western ecosystem.

[mangatmodi]

Actually English is the most common language across India. Majority of the app ecosystem in India is English only.

In Europe, majority of people can't read English at all. I mean atleast people from Germany, Spain, Italy and France.

[rini17]

Yes the EU single market works well for goods, but not so much for services. Not just languages, there are significant law differences as well.

[BugWatch]

That, and the inter-cultural differences are certainly a large stumbling block.

[908B64B197]

These EU giants wouldn't pay anymore taxes than the current tech giants do.

If Europe wants to compete, why not simply create an ecosystem where Europeans companies can succeed?