| We make B2B software that we sell in several EU countries, which interfaces with official systems. Even though all countries are subject to the same EU rules, and follow the same underlying technical model, each country has its own laws and regulations, and separate implementations. So even though our software does "the same thing" in each country, it's so different that a lot of code is per-country, over 50%. So it's several times the job of doing it once. However, that's the easy bit, it just takes more development time. The hard part is getting access to systems, coordinate testing and all those things which require national agencies to answer. And if they have to get an answer from some EU instance, well, it's usually blind luck if we get a response. Just as an example, it took us over a year to get test access to a new system, because access was given centrally in EU, even though the endpoint was hosted nationally. And that was for the country where we managed to get access... I get that US state laws differ, but from my understanding it's not nearly as different as it is between member countries in the EU. And we're just doing B2B, which I assume is easy mode. I just don't see how we can compete when at best you can access a fraction of the users without a nightmare of red tape and whatnot. |
Easy, yes, but expensive for the business and its customers. It's a silly way to do things, but it's hard to see an alternative without member states giving up massive amounts of sovereignty.