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By Suzanna Kerridge, 25 May 2000 15:20

NEWS European start-ups have a harder time than their US counterparts as they struggle with regulations, skills shortages and expensive access charges. Speaking at Gartner Group's Internet and Electronic Business Europe 2000 conference in Paris, analyst Anne-Marie Roussel, said: "The difficulties European start-ups see are different to those the US experience. There are regulatory, market and technical barriers. The deregulation of the telecoms market is also a barrier as countries deregulate at different speeds so access costs across the continent vary greatly." Encryption, she claimed, was one of the largest barriers to carrying out transactions. She said: "The best encryption is in the US but this is banned for export for all companies except banks. This is because it is considered as a national defence concern and countries are worried the criminal element will use it. As a result countries cannot agree on an acceptable level of encryption." Roussel also blamed poor performance in the past for hindering European growth. She said: "In Europe, they have been plagued by the bad performance of the Internet that the US has not had to cope with. The Internet is a US network and until two to three years ago all the processing power was in the US. This put people off and no one surfed the Web after lunch once the Americans had woken up as it was too slow." Roussel claimed culture and language difficulties also presented business problem the US did not have to cope with. Saverio Bettini, director at Marconi EMEA, agreed. He said: "Europe has less ways to access the Internet and it is changing at a great pace but it take time and there are cultural and technical barriers. Europeans are more cautious than Americans and this can be an inhibitor." But Kim Jensen, IT manager at Danish firm WM Data claimed being a true European company was expensive. Jensen said: "Companies doing B2B should be used to dealing with individual customers and their different needs. They are used to dealing with customers in 30 languages but it is an expensive problem many continental companies are reluctant to deal with."