[devuo]

US companies are free to not operate in Europe.

There's nothing special about US software engineering vs. software engineering made elsewhere from a purely technical and know-how point of view.

The key difference is availability of capital and appetite for risk that make US exceptional by enabling a speed of scaling and execution not possible anywhere else (well, other than China).

If US companies that can't be bothered to follow EU laws leave the +500M people market that is the EU, I'm positive some other equally competent alternative (local or otherwise) would appear sooner or later to fill in the gap.

[Workaccount2]

Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.

The EU has some extremely strong consumer protection laws, which is excellent for consumers, but it comes with downsides too.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.

Nah, it's all the capital which gets invested into the US caused by the dollar's role in international payments that drives the US exceptionalism is tech.

Like, 65% of world equity value relates to 4% of the world population. That's not sustainable long-term, and if something cannot go on forever, then one day it will stop (and we might be seeing that start to happen now).

Don't get me wrong, the US market has a bunch of advantages (large, one language, standard regulation) but it's mostly all the capital sloshing around that drives the outperformance of the US tech companies.