Yeah I guess the EU is too broad to comment on bureaucracy, but for core markets like Germany and France, I've seen lots of discussion on HN from people who started businesses there. The consensus was that there's a lot of red tape, but that there are a lot of Pros to starting a business in the EU as well.

Yeah, I would definitely steer clear of Germany and France for starting the business. Thankfully, the Estonian option gives you easy access to the Single Market without worrying about all that :)

Historically, _the EU as an institution_ doesn't have a particularly coherent view on encryption; the EC periodically tries to push anti-encryption stuff but gets slapped down by the parliament and/or ECJ.

(This happens particularly _visibly_ due to the EU's weird structure. In most democratic states, there are consequences for the executive trying to do things that the parliament is definitely not going to allow them to do (in some parliamentary systems failure by the executive to get something through tends to result in the executive becoming an ex-executive), so if the executive has something it doesn't think it can get through, it keeps quiet about it; it may talk about it in private but is unlikely to risk a defeat by parliament. In the EU system, there are no consequences, so you do tend to see the EC pushing things that have little realistic chance of getting through the parliament quite often.)