EU policy is driven mostly by the member states, so looking at what national leaders say is often more useful than what the Commission, which has every incentive to placate everyone involved, says.
It's important to note that one will chase a particularly high number of unicorns abroad these days because software is so dominant lately, benefits from enormous economies of scale, and is highly untethered to very localized infrastructure, know-how, or demand preferences. In Europe you'd usually have to create a bunch of slightly tailored alternative surface experiences for publics with different languages and tastes, and if you're going to do that anyway you can do it from anywhere where it's easy to get connected to money and talent.
1. Customizations needed to comply with national legislation. Do the national legislations implement GDPR in different ways, adding different additional requirements? Etc.
2. Language. Given the fast progress in machine translation, can we assume that the i18n problem will be solved in relatively short term?
3. Genuinely different tastes in different countries. But are the Portuguese tastes that much different from Estonian testes? And how is that different from different tastes in different US states?
Seems to be big software companies dealing in many markets already successfully bear the burden of navigating all these local factors, or paying consulting companies which specialize in helping them do so. "International commerce" law firms help deal with all the compliance matters, there are plenty of language translation services companies, and marketing competence, like humor, is usually quite localized. What AI will do is make all that much cheaper and within the reach of small startups, which means more of them will move to greener pastures even faster.
I suspect the EU knows and anticipates this, and will either impose taxes that take a cut of revenues from IT services sales from abroad to make up for lost local production, or require lots of local hiring and investment to buy a license to do business, or go full Soviet, impose capital controls, and stop letting talent leave.
It's important to note that one will chase a particularly high number of unicorns abroad these days because software is so dominant lately, benefits from enormous economies of scale, and is highly untethered to very localized infrastructure, know-how, or demand preferences. In Europe you'd usually have to create a bunch of slightly tailored alternative surface experiences for publics with different languages and tastes, and if you're going to do that anyway you can do it from anywhere where it's easy to get connected to money and talent.
This seems to split into three distinct problems:
1. Customizations needed to comply with national legislation. Do the national legislations implement GDPR in different ways, adding different additional requirements? Etc.
2. Language. Given the fast progress in machine translation, can we assume that the i18n problem will be solved in relatively short term?
3. Genuinely different tastes in different countries. But are the Portuguese tastes that much different from Estonian testes? And how is that different from different tastes in different US states?
Seems to be big software companies dealing in many markets already successfully bear the burden of navigating all these local factors, or paying consulting companies which specialize in helping them do so. "International commerce" law firms help deal with all the compliance matters, there are plenty of language translation services companies, and marketing competence, like humor, is usually quite localized. What AI will do is make all that much cheaper and within the reach of small startups, which means more of them will move to greener pastures even faster.
I suspect the EU knows and anticipates this, and will either impose taxes that take a cut of revenues from IT services sales from abroad to make up for lost local production, or require lots of local hiring and investment to buy a license to do business, or go full Soviet, impose capital controls, and stop letting talent leave.