Ask HN: How will Trump tarrifs affect remote workers outside US? I am currently working remotely from EU against US and I wonder how the ongoing and escalating trade wars will affect us. Anyone already being affected? What are your plans for the future? |
If you are a European startup and were considered "only an alternative" to a bigger competitor...now's the time to push it out and be seen for it. There's a huge demand right now, and it won't easily go away for the next (remaining) 4 years. The civil war that in my opinion is unavoidable won't make it better for US stability.
And you slightly mis-parsed my words. A migration of cloud services from US providers isn't the same as to a "European Cloud". Canada, Australia, India, Vietnam, South Africa... there's a whole world of nominally friendly and economically viable suppliers out there. What matters is moving from Microsoft, AWS, Google and other services that cannot be considered "safe" any longer.
I notice from your profile you're an AWS disciple. You must know AWS want to build a "Euro Sovereign" division? Not that I think it will be successful, but look at which way the wind is blowing.
Oh come on, can we stop with that? Not having regulations results in quasi-monopolies and oligarchs. Preaching against regulation is only worth it if you are Google, Amazon & Co. Regulations don't prevent fairly big companies from existing.
Maybe the lack of regulations in the US pushes EU companies to move there. But right now maybe non-Americans will start looking for non-US alternatives, and that's good.
I'm not sure they will directly affect remote workers. Or at least the mechanism seems unclear.
Tariffs are currently collected at a port of entry by Customs (CBP staff.)
Since remote work does not flow through a port, its not clear who would collect this tax (presumably your US employer) or how they would submit it for payment.
In other words I'm not aware if remote work is classed as an "import" , or how it would be collected and submitted.
I am keen to hear of any actual legal opinions in this space.
last time the rules changed, some companies hired people from their own countries instead. if this happens again, it may be harder to find jobs in the U.S.
to be safe, i try to work with people from many places, not just one.
Where generally EU-based businesses aren't allowed to move their cloud infrastructure either.
With the US and Privacy Shield there at least used to be an agreement in place. While that agreement was frivolously nullified by EU courts, at least so far authorities haven't been overly eager to enforce that, probably because they know that'd put pretty much every EU-based company out of business.
Have fun trying to convince zealous bureaucrats and lawyers that hosting your customer data in Vietnam is fine for an EU-based business, though.
With the US and Privacy Shield there at least was an attempt to come to some sort of reasonable real-life solution (which of course was shot down by EU courts, so as of 2020 pretty much every EU-based business is in a legal limbo).
You're talking specifically about AWS competitors, right? I don't think it's related to GDPR. It's really that everybody uses AWS. Would you say that Canada doesn't have a competitor to AWS because of their regulations, too?
Regulations like the GDPR precisely try to give incentives for competitors. Which is hard to do because people/companies fight to use the US solutions and don't care about privacy, just convenience.
It failed miserably at that, too. Apart from Plausible there's hardly any business worth mentioning that used GDPR as a competitive advantage. GDPR for the most part has been a stimulus program for lawyers and government busybodies.
The privacy shield was 'shot down' because it would allow the US unprecedented access to personal data of EU civilians (including unlimited surveillance).
GDPR is not that bad. It has downsides but it is not overly complex.
Companies (including cloud services) have to comply if they want to have business in Europe.
Fines by EU: Meta: 1.5 billion Amazon: 750 million TikTok: 350 million Clearview: 30 million Apple: 1.5 billion
That's just a perspective from reality, where people are doing business rather than contriving impractical regulations out of thin air .
> GDPR is not that bad. It has downsides but it is not overly complex.
It might seem simple to consumers or politicians who claim they could implement it in a day, but it is highly complex once you have to implement it as a small or medium-sized business.
> Companies (including cloud services) have to comply if they want to have business in Europe
Large corporations - i.e. the supposed target of that regulation - scoff at GDPR. They have legal departments and the funds necessary to deal with GDPR however they see fit, while small and medium-sized business bear the brunt.
You can't take the GDPR, and conclude that regulations as an idea is bad.
Though I didn't make that claim, in fact I precisely think that more often than not that's indeed the case. Regulations often serve no other purpose than to create yet more red tape procedures and self-serving structures.