Source? Assuming you're talking about 18% of traffic and not percentage of websites, how do you define what counts as traffic in that case? Transfer between AS's? Does internal traffic within AS's count? Does traffic between entities within the same AS count (e.g traffic from one AWS customer to another, or traffic from a Netflix OCA to an ISP?) I'm skeptical of any entities ability to fully measure the throughput of the internet even remotely accurately. The closest estimate you'll likely get is if you're a transit provider able to measure data transfer, and even then you'll be lucky to extrapolate within the correct order of magnitude from that for total global inter-AS traffic.
This is a point worth emphasizing, a tax being repealed does not necessarily imply a lack of efficacy, due to the aforementioned reasons of political influence/corruption etc. Switzerland has done very well with a global wealth tax, arguably being the highest standard of living in Europe.
Its so investors can leverage the massive tax breaks available when investing in US based startups. Hence why YC also lets you found in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Note this is probably not the official reason, as it's generally frowned upon internationally to encourage tax avoidance.
The simpler, less cynical answer is that it's not just a US-based company, it has to be a Delaware-based company.
This is because all of the laws around founding, investing, selling, etc. a company are extremely well-trodden in Delaware, and there are very few question marks as to how some strange eventuality or disagreement might be handled.
Since startups are already incredibly difficult, this is a way of normalizing away some of the weird situations that could cause a startup to fail (and likely would never cause them to succeed), so that everyone is putting energy into the real unknown unknowns around the startup.
My take is indeed probably more cynical and you're very correct about Delaware being well-trodden, but it does raise the question why the FAQs mention a bunch of well known corporate tax havens [0](Cayman Islands and Singapore) and not other well-trodden territories such as the UK, which has a really straightforward and efficient ecosystem surrounding startup law and incorporation (SeedLegals etc.) and plenty of history to extrapolate from. Also the FAQs mention nothing about having to be in Delaware, perhaps they should be updated?
It's an interesting question, but I suspect that there are other, easier ways of normalizing companies from those regions to be Delaware-based (or something that prevents it, perhaps in Singapore's case, not sure), whereas outside of those there's really only this nuclear "company flip" option.
YC hates anything specialized about a company re: this sort of thing - hence no special deals, etc., so I'd bet more on other normalization factors rather than no normalization.
It's worth mentioning IP law is applied on a per-territory basis (i.e. you have to register your IP in every territory you would like it enforced, and that territory's courts are solely responsible for its enforcement in that territory). Many countries government have laws which restrict IP in national security concerns [0], which nuclear reactors may come under. Furthermore, patents require the innovation used is published publicly, which may not be desirable for sensitive technologies like nuclear reactors. Trade secrets and the like are more likely to be used in this particular case.
If there is sufficient deviation from GDPR (who knows what will happen from this speculative article alone), the UK will probably lose its adequacy to transfer personal data, which will materially impact how international organisations can transfer data. In fact the recent UK-EU adequacy decision explicitly states this [0]:
'For the first time, the adequacy decisions include a so-called ‘sunset clause', which strictly limits their duration. This means that the decisions will automatically expire four years after their entry into force. After that period, the adequacy findings might be renewed, however, only if the UK continues to ensure an adequate level of data protection. During these four years, the Commission will continue to monitor the legal situation in the UK and could intervene at any point, if the UK deviates from the level of protection currently in place. Should the Commission decide to renew the adequacy finding, the adoption process would start again.'.
The impact of a loss of adequacy will be significant on UK service providers, as it will become significantly easier from a regulatory perspective to just host within the EU for both UK and EU customers than to deal with the hassle of using UK datacenters.
If I understand it correctly, the recent CJEU ruling on GDPR [0] should improve the Irish DPC limitations by allowing enforcement in other member states where violations have occurred (under certain specific conditions).
Nit: Switzerland as a country is a semi-direct democracy not a direct democracy. Only 2 cantons fulfil the criteria for the classical definition of direct democracy.
I've used JSON schema a fair bit for config files for provisioning infrastructure and its been great. For example I have a kubernetes clusters JSON file cleanly schematized which specs all the clusters I need (node pools, metadata etc), which I generate TS types from using 'json-schema-to-typescript', and then just iterate over these in pulumi. All I need to do is update the JSON file to update my infra, and the coding experience is brilliant with pretty much complete type safety.
The customisability is definitely a plus, you can make slate fit in perfectly with almost any UI. Whilst you don't get complex image handling by default, I think their image handling example [0] is a really nice minimal implementation which is quite intuitive.
