I wish Labour would impose any regulation on the tech industry, let alone "heavy". The UK is running sacred of Trump and will do nothing to stop the US tech giants avoiding tax and causing social unrest.
Because the UK does not care about its own technology businesses and simply offshores the work overseas and even when they don't, they end up selling off the company to a foreign buyer.
> Would more regulations imposed by a Labour government help to turn that around?
Actually, you have it the other way around! Why hasn't the US done more to create a rich ecosystem of tech companies, instead of a couple of bloated giants that syphon our wealth and avoid taxes?
Actually, you have it the other way around! The US has a rich ecosystem of rapidly growing startup tech companies. Many of us on HN are working for them. There has never been a better time to build something new.
Yes, I was! Building new stuff back then was much harder due to lack of enabling infrastructure and tools. Just to take one example, AWS only started offering real cloud services in 2006 and for the first few years it wasn't a platform you could really use to build a whole company.
> Why hasn't the UK been able to create any local tech giants?
In the UK there are several tech or tech adjacent companies valued in the tens or hundreds of billions such as ARM, BAE, Revolut, Sage and delivery companies like Deliveroo & Ocado are tech equivalents. Sure there could be more but given that the UK only recently came out of 14 years of being run by pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, small-government conservatives, I don't think it's 18 months of weak Labour rule that is the issue. Personally, from having spent half my life there working in tech, I think it's more a mix of culture and market size.
I often hear "why are the big tech companies only in the US" but there are big tech companies all over the world that people haven't heard of because "we" have a US focused media. The big 7 do definitely dominate globally but I'd argue that this isn't actually a healthy situation or model that other countries should emulated. I suspect smaller, localized versions of US companies would probably have better consequences.
