[nickff]

> "What does work is making it easy to do business - cutting bureaucracy - and tax breaks. No one wants the headache of starting a business here. And the few that do, against all odds, get something off the ground, they quickly move their corporate headquarters to more tax friendly nations."

I am not an insider who has any special knowledge of the motivations of companies exiting Europe, but I suspect that those companies are at least as worried about regulatory uncertainty as they are about tax rates. The EU has a history of suddenly killing 'undesirable' business models and products through regulation. The EU also seems to make it generally difficult to scale up and scale down businesses, due to labor market regulations; if you're having a rough spell, you basically can't lay off your least productive workers and try to 'regroup', you might as well just sell off the productive business units, and shut down.

[throwaway13337]

It's a mixed bag.

I think you're trying to refer to the Digital Markets Act indirectly at least with part of your comment.

Actually, I mostly believe in this regulation. Gatekeepers are a new kind of monopoly/government. This, too, discourages innovation. The US should have a spine against these companies. I'm glad the EU is, at least, trying to.

It also doesn't really affect small business. Or, indeed, helps them. I hope they can, in the end, force Apple to allow more than safari browser on iphones so PWAs can be a real thing.

GDPR, on the other hand, is hell for small businesses. It's complicated and scary. Understanding and implementing the rules is expensive. It's broader than you think - restaurants, for example, are often technically breaking the rules. Most businesses are breaking the rules somehow without knowing it. This is the sign of bad law.

From a consumer perspective, the cookie thing was just not thought out and extremely negative. Bad rules written by unthoughtful legislators. If they wanted to ban third party tracking, they should have just done that.

With respect to labor rules, I generally agree.

[burnerthrow008]

> I hope they can, in the end, force Apple to allow more than safari browser on iphones so PWAs can be a real thing.

You really have to respect Apple though: Despite the fact that they have approximately 30% market share in smart phones globally, and even smaller fraction of the overall browser market, they have single-handedly prevented PWAs from becoming a thing.

It’s even more amazing when you consider how Apple was not able to prevent Android-native and Windows-native apps (which have a smaller addressable market than PWAs)! Apple must have projected all their magic juju at the PWA market and forgotten to save any for native Android apps.

We know this is true because only the stupidest person could believe that users don’t like PWAs, and that PWAs simply failed on their own merits.

> This is a sign of a bad law.

Or maybe it is a sign that European businesses have normalized some really bad and abusive practices, and that the EC needs to crack down harder on consumer protections until those businesses get the message. Maybe 20% of revenue for a start? What was it that everyone likes to say about Apple? “Just follow the law”

[mensetmanusman]

“Just follow the law”

/lays down 20,999 page book