I have a genuine question about this movement. Small businesses and startups aren’t the problem. Why “buy from EU” instead of “stop buying from big corporations” regardless of their countries? Small businesses (from anywhere) cannot absorb the rising costs and tariffs, and they are struggling.
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I dont care whether it’s big or small, if it’s a US business I’d rather shop elsewhere. Voting with our wallets is pretty much the only option for a normal EU citizen to show what we think of this current shitshow.
And you know what, I want the businesses in the US to feel the effect of those tariffs. They voted for them, I sure as hell am not going to stop them from enjoying the consequences.
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Big EU business is definitely less problematic right now than big US business. Granted, they’re often trying to be as bad.
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Business with the US leads to tax payments to the US government.
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Doing business with the US is very risky right now if you’re in any way locked-in, they might start imposing tariffs, steal your data, be generally fascist or just get put out of business by government policy at any moment. And part of the way we’re locked in is that in many fields, there are no or nearly no european competitors who can supply the goods at a similar price and performance.
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From a purely egoistic perspective, it’s generally better to support local small business instead of overseas small business.
I agree with the support of local businesses’ perspective. However, EU companies are also vulnerable to policy changes like the recent Italy DNS poisoning law or the France encryption backdoor law just last month. Supporting a small business also comes with fostering a community. Especially if it’s FOSS, a subculture, or minority-owned.
True, but none of these are good arguments for choosing US businesses over EU businesses when you’re an EU resident. Why should I support a US-based community, subculture, minority when I could support the same kinds of things in my own country or neighboring countries?
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Because it doesn’t matter if its big or small. If it’s American, it pays taxes in the US, it’s boycotted.
Do you think the current US regime is being selective about the size of EU companies that are being hit by their unwarranted tariffs? Of course not.
Nor will we.
One main reason: market consolidation in Europe is a real need. Only companies with a lot of scale can compete adequately in terms of product featureset and innovation. European alternatives usually lack scale to to compete.
In simple terms, if you’re competing in an R&D heavy industry (like consumer technology, software, f.e.) having 2 or 3 big companies is always going to lead to more competitive products when compared to a market with 20 or 30 small ones. The problem with Europe is that that we don’t even have 20 or 30 small ones.
Take Nothing for example, I think their idea is to compete with Apple, Google and the Chinese brands in the phone market. But they are many, many times smaller than those. So they’re going to be forced to use components and technology that’s already established, they’re not going to innovate outside of design and simple things like UI simply because they lack the funding to do anything else.
The situation is not ideal, but unless we create our own behemoths, we won’t be able to compete in the short term.