Comment by fxtentacle
1 year ago
I'd say the biggest issue with this article is that it only suggests solutions which are already underway.
1. Salary Grants => SEED / EXIST stipends
2. Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations => Who doesn't want that?
3. Expand VAT Exemptions => Council Directive (EU) 2020/285 will bring this law: "For SMEs conducting cross-border transactions, a cumulative turnover cap of €100,000 across all 27 EU member states applies"
4. English Language Support => I'd say most of the EU is already pretty good at this.
> 2. Simplify Bureaucracy and Regulations => Who doesn't want that?
European leadership and a fair chunk of the population. They're the ones who bought it in, if they didn't think it was worth the trade off they wouldn't have instituted it.
It seems like just yesterday we had people lining up to praise their bureaucratic takeover of iPhone charger design, for example. If the EU bureaucracy has time for that, what matter is too small for them to be involved in?
The EU is a market optimising machine in many ways, and the bigger the market, the more interested they are. It made perfect sense for them to intervene there because it affected a huge number of people.
Similarly, I expect user serviceable batteries to come to an iPhone near you at some point, in the name (quite reasonably) of environmental regulations.
The charger situation is much better than GDPR or CE marking, in that it clearly mandates what should be done. The other two get bogged down because it's so unclear what has to be done to be compliant while actually shipping a service or product.
The typical formula is: if you aren't confident that you are complying with the law, maybe don't operate a business that way. Welcome to compliance!
That is the thing with bureaucracy; it isn't there to help people run just-acceptable privacy violating businesses. It is there to squelch the ones that are unacceptable. If you want the EU to write an acceptable business plan it'd be "don't start this business, it might violate privacy". And there does seem to be support for the EU regulating in that manner. I haven't met many people who are pro-privacy-violations.
2 replies →
> I'd say most of the EU is already pretty good at this
Not Germany though. I don't think that's as easy to change as VAT changes. And since a bunch of their examples are primarily B2B, they wouldn't care about VAT changes either.