Dragos Novac‘s Sunday CET newsletter asked the question: is Europe a first tier market?
Scroll down to the Observations section for a longer piece on Threads vs Twitter and Europe as a continent not needed to build an Internet scale service (or rather a geography to launch in once you’ve got traction in the US and most other places ex-China).
“As Facebook showed this week, the EU is such an ‘innovative environment’ that dudes actually shipping interesting global products will rather make them unavailable by default to European consumers, or at best left at the bottom of the todo list. That’s because the EU market has become expensive and increasingly a pain in the ass to deal with – why allocate overheads for personalisation and spend $$ to comply to politics-driven rules when you can get to scale size without Europe, as Threads just did this week? This ‘Europe last, maybe never’ kind of product launch is a trend started by Google with Bard a few months ago, and likely to continue because of the risk of the EU hunting you down, while being available to Euro markets is expensive to begin with anyways. And a ‘first tier market’ such as Europe ends up as the last to adopt new tech, right?”
While Bard has now launched in Europe, this is a very good example of why regulation need to be smart and specific to not lead to economic welfare losses.
