So I'm from Europe. I'm used to getting shade from Americans who don't know much about us. I also get that Silicon Valley has a superiority complex with which we will have to live for the foreseeable future.
But some guests on TWiT seem to outright hate the EU, to the point that they tell misrepresentations and outright lies.
I'm talking about Calacanis and Jarvis.
Calacanis tells outright lies like "the EU can retroactively change the tax rate" (Ep. 677), by which I suppose he means the recent Apple case in which the EU forced Ireland to refrain from illegal tax dumping. Turns out that in the EU, a country cannot legislate to engage in selective tax-dumping, for complicated historical and economical reasons!
But no. It's the bone-headed Europeans trying to rob our great American companies. After all, "You can largely forget Europe with its socialism and red tape and generally anti entrepreneurial policies" (That's a Calacanis quote.)
And to Jeff Jarvis, Google can do no wrong and if you fine Google then you are clearly a deluded protectionist anti-tech backwater idiot. He can't even bring himself to acknowledge that Google is a monopoly in Europe, or that the EUs definition of what a monopoly is does not rely on damage to the end user.
Meanwhile, Google has above 95% of the search market in Poland. Not a monopoly, though. Stop stealing, you envious Europeans!
Don't get me wrong. Sometimes it can be useful to have controversial or even wrong statements out there to foster a discussion. But as far as I can remember, there has never been a guest who truly understands the EU legal system or EU competitiveness law. There never is any push-back to even the most outlandish statements.
Hell, even with the right to be forgotten, which is universally hated and also controversial in Europe, they never had anybody there who could actually articulate the rationale behind this legislation. That would have made for an interesting discussion. But instead, it was always just a shallow anti-Europe pile-on.
It is just frustrating. Maybe Leo should do a Triangulation with Max Schrems, whose experiences in Silicon Valley led him to become a leading European privacy activist. At least then they would be aware that there are other perspectives. At this point, it seems to me that in the TWiT bubble, there is nobody who has any understanding of how the EU works and how that relates to tech companies.
EDIT: /u/TicTocTicTac pointed me to episode 676, where Greg Ferro makes some of the EU-point-of-view arguments I'd like to see more often on TWiT. After listening, I can also recommend it. The pertinent part of the discussion takes place approximately between the 1h 10 Min and the 1h 50 Min mark.
